Urban Music Rebels – Sauti za Busara Festival & LP production – 2020

The Urban Music Rebels’ journey continued in 2020 and reunited the musicians at the Sauti za Busara Festival in Zanzibar from February 13 – 17. The regional project is a cooperation between the Goethe-Instituts Rwanda, Tanzania, (since 2020 also) Kenya and the Goethe-Zentrum Kampala. The Urban Music Rebels collective was founded in 2019 to reflect the growing interest in experimental, futuristic electronic dance music (EDM) in East Africa. As part of the Sauti za Busara Festival, the second workshop of the Music Rebels took place in 2020, focusing on the preparation and development of their first music album. Our Ugandan participants Okello Lawrence and Isaiah Mucunguzi experienced an intensive and diverse program on site and were able to expand their artists’ network. Originally, the Urban Music Rebels collective was supposed to perform at the Bayimba Festival in Kampala in August 2020 with their first album. Due the Covid-19 crisis, these plans had fallen apart and the planned gathering in Kigali in mid-2020 unfortunately had to be cancelled as well. From March 2020 on, the cooperation of the music rebels has shifted from presence to online, their focus was now on the production of their first LP, which under the given circumstances could only take place in virtual exchange. The LP production is in the final stage and will be published in the beginning of 2021 – stay tuned!