Seven years after “Tatizo Pesa” carried singeli from the streets of Dar es Salaam onto the global map, one of the genre’s pioneers, and the producer who first pushed it out into the world, returns. Jay Mitta releases his sophomore album “Kazi Kwanza” on September 4 via Nyege Nyege Tapes.
Entirely instrumental, the album marks a real evolution. Made at Sisso Studios in Mburahati, the studio where singeli itself was born, it pushes the genre’s breakneck rhythms through trap, trance, grime, drill and hard techno while staying rooted in Dar es Salaam. With the MC gone, rhythm, texture and production carry the record, opening singeli into a language shaped by both local and global club music, another instance of Mitta pushing the genre somewhere new before anyone else gets there.
Mitta has collaborated with Errorsmith, The Modern Institute and Caterina Barbieri, and shared stages with DJ Diaki, carrying singeli’s influence well beyond the scene that made him.
Thirteen tracks move between ecstatic velocity and unexpected melancholy: distorted synths, hardstyle kicks, trance euphoria, metallic percussion, fractured techno. A radically future facing portrait of Dar es Salaam, landing next week, from the producer who first took this sound global.
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