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Twende – Dance Classics

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Hailing from Tanzania’s bustling cultural hub Dar Es Salaam – the biggest city in East Africa – young beatmaker DJ Travella is setting the breakneck pace for its musical evolution. He’s been producing since he was just 10 years old and has already bent singeli into surprising new shapes, welding euphoric EDM breakdowns and earworm-y R&B riffs to the Tanzanian genre’s frenetic rhythms. ‘Twende’ is a straight-to-the-point set of the producer’s most requested secret weapons – four hyper-melodic floor fillers that were developed shortly after releasing his acclaimed debut album ‘Mr Mixondo’. Featured on his popular Boiler Room performance, these tracks will be familiar to anyone who’s managed to catch one of his sets.

Starting things out right with ‘Trust’, a wonky, festival-ready 170BPM ass shaker that shuffles a familiar singeli beat around wormy synths, Travella keeps things moving with the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it ‘Believe’, a minute and a half of brassy pop fanfares and buzzing rhythms. On ‘Mchakamchaka’ he introduces quivering soukous guitar phrases into the mix, keeping up the momentum with crowd noise and pneumatic sound design vamps, and ‘Vumbi Vumbi’ slows things down, just a bit, splaying plasticky, acidic leads over blown-out syncopated beats. It’s one for the feet, no doubt.

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