Club Clandestino: DUMA

Oceanen och Clandestino present: DUMA

DUMA

Emerging from a number of different band constellations in the small but vital metal scene of Nairobi, Duma is the brainchild of vocalist Martin Khanja and the guitarist/producer Sam Karugu. They had both long been rebelling against established genre boundaries, but it wasn’t until they moved to Kampala in Uganda and formed this band that all the pieces fell into place. They experimentally concocted their eponymous debut, and thus created their own genre. How to describe this monster of an album? With machine gun ­percussion, growling vocals, swooping synths and electronic noise, Duma creates a hybrid of black metal, hip hop and singeli – the frenetic dance music from Tanzania.

The lyrics deal with the day to day life of the band: love, hate, partying, and to be young and broke. But there is also Pembe 666, consisting of paragraphs from the Book of Revelations, sung in Swahili. And Lionsblood, which tells of a rite of passage in the Maasai culture: young men ­venturing out into the wild to kill a lion and smear themselves with its blood. The theme is turned on its head in the video for the track, where unbothered youths sip on a red liquid next to a ­swimming pool – in Kenya, lion’s tears is a synonym for liquor.