Come see Dj Travella at the Nyege Nyege Festival in Bordeaux on July 12 and 13, 2025. To get your tickets, follow the link here.
Today, capturing the zeitgeist has become a game of shooting fish in barrels. The world is burning and our decisions are overshadowed by a feeling of looming apocalypse. Millions of images and ads provide the inescapable frame of reference for both the capitalist and the anarchist. Whether we’re listening to Taylor Swift’s country-doodas or Arca’s perreo-noise, we’re crushed by the overbearring spirit of our times. But DJ Travella provides something different. Not a mirror to our mayhem. Nor an alternative. What he offers is a cure. A zeitabhilfe. The Tanzanian singeli superstar blinds us with a utopian vision of the world. A return to ecstatic joy and childlike wonder. Contagious in its naïveté, and intoxicating for its lack of cynicism. Is it in the mindful placement of wonky synths? The hopeful melodies? The nature of his performance; always live, always different? Or is it some other secret sauce beamed in from the astral planes? Whatever it is, young flyboy Travella has synthesised some of the purest and most joyful music available. And it feels fucking good.
“I started doing music when I was 15 years old,” Travella, real name Hamadi Hassani, told me in his native Swahili. Over the years Travella would become a fixture in my musical world. From the first performance in 2022 at Le Guess Who? in Utrecht, to the riverbanks of the Nile at Nyege Nyege in 2024, I’ve been hooked on the medicine. The troubadour has crashed on my couch in Paris and I’ve visited him in his hometown of Dar es Salaam. Each show is better than therapy. It’s an electroshock of joy. “I like singeli music because it is Tanzanian music,” Travella explains. “And people like it because it makes them happy.” Y’a don’t say?
For those unaware, singeli is Tanzania’s hottest popular music. “In Tanzania, singeli music is number one,” Travella says with a toothy grin, “it’s original music derived from taarabu, mchiriku, and mdundiko.” Born in the working class neighborhoods of Tandale and Manzese, connected by Morogoro Road, singeli was Tanzania’s “underground” electronic music in the early 00s, overshadowed by the likes of bongo flava. After years of “lurking in the underground” singeli exploded onto the mainstream. The sound itself is full of wicked little Yamaha riffs and shameless sound effects, punctuated by an overwhelming slam of poorly produced kicks and percussions. Most singeli feels like a video game war-zone. Especially the internationally renowned breed of singeli pushed by Nyege Nyege from the studios of Sisso and Pamoja. Using a combination of hyper-fast loops, taarab melodies, mchiriku percussive patterns, and the happy marriage of bedroom producers and street MCs, singeli won the hearts of Tanzanians. This raw, DIY sound is now the soundtrack to political rallies and massive shows, spawning its own series of sub-genres and micro-celebrities.
Scenes of singeli parties have reached mythical status. Hundreds of people stomping up dust around a soundsystem, dancing with a frenetic energy that you can only observe with wide eyed admiration. Songs can reach up to 200 bpm, in-other-words, stupid fast. And dancers use their shoulders, knees and above all, hips, to make singeli one of the world’s most impressive twerk musics. Not to mention the kigodoro marathons, nicknamed after the mattresses placed on the edges of the dancefloor where participants collapse from exhaustion. Thanks to its unmatched ability to “get the people going”, singeli is now a fixture at weddings and traditional celebrations, sometimes replacing traditional orchestras. That’s where Travella got his start, “I was in my neighbourhood called Mbagala Charambe and I was doing singeli in small places like ceremonies or weddings,” he says.
But what Travella brings to singeli is a dimension away from his peers. He didn’t grow up in the hardcore hotbed of Tandale and Manzese with Sisso, Duke, and Bamba Pana. Nor did he conform to the “popular” singeli sound which has an MC-oriented taarabu, singsongy vibe. Like the other production-pure-players, Travella remains mostly instrumental. But his music is astral and outer orbit; the synths have this electro soukous 2.0 feeling, his samples are straight out of a malfunctioning children’s toy, and the vocals (which are sometimes his own, or at least I believe he admitted so during a conversation on my couch) are happily ethereal. And the melodies! These looping progressions are lullabies on crack. Somehow it all comes together in a gooey, smiley mess that is totally contagious.
During live performances you can see Travella hunched over his computer with a dogged concentration. Using FL Studio, Travella continuously brings in and out a selection of 8 “tracks” or rather a combination of melodies, sound effects, drum loops, and vocals. He drags and drops these audio files from folders on his computer and into the software, carefully choosing which tracks to cut and which to bring back in with his mouse and trackpad. It’s 100% live and 100% original. Travella is “playing” his software like an instrument; the way Lee Scratch Perry was “playing” his music studio in Kingston. “It is simple music to create,” Travella says humbly, “and also not expensive. When you have a laptop and keyboard you can do it.”
Simple or not, Travella, who has been on tour since he was 19 (now 22), has mastered his technique. He’s a specialist at building tension, giving room to breathe, and nestling electric signals into your brain that shoot to your feet (and cheeks). He’s also toyed with homemade midi controllers, using computer keyboards that he jams on like a handheld guitar, or re-adapted PS4 controllers that he uses to cut and drop beats. All this has culminated in an experience that most describe as “holy fuck”. As someone who’s been lucky enough to see Travella in many countries and in many settings, it’s a virtual guarantee that someone from the audience with big dilated eyes exclaims at the end that the set that it was “totally life-changing”. It’s a grandiose claim but one I have serious empathy for. Welcome to the cult of Travella. You can see it for yourself in his Barcelona, Primavera Boiler Room performance. Or check out the comments from the recorded sets at Draaimolen and NTS guest appearances overwhelmed by users professing Travella as #1. “best I heard in years! deep yet playful, i love it!!! +1 in the glad-2-b-alive-right-now bin” says one. “Travella is a genius,” says another. Or simply, “HOW!?”.
But it’s more than just his skill. It’s his tone. “I first got to know Travella as a person, not as an artist,” says Rosa Pistola, a legendary Colombian DJ and producer actively reimagining reggaeton, merengue-house and more. “I saw him step onto the stage and his light illuminated the universe. Honestly, the only things I can say about him are beautiful ones. His sound inspires me; I find it innovative and authentic. In this dark time of wars and hyper-accelerated sounds, mostly driven by an apocalyptic and post-industrial aesthetic, discovering Travella’s music feels refreshing. To me, it evokes happiness, dance, and unity. That’s why, for me, he shines brighter than other artists.” Rosa Pistola and Travella have since collaborated on the track “Wave It” with Freebot.
And there it is. There’s the antidote. A light in the dark. Untouched by the global gloom and doom. Travella floats above all the cynicism and acrimony with unburdened celebration. Truth be told, this vision, this feeling, is a more radical, more difficult point of view. It’s so easy to sink into the darkness and destruction that colors so much of our modern club music. But with Travella we get brief respite. We get what we’re craving but are often too afraid to express. Too distracted to notice. Too confused to care. To be free from worry, in the moment, with astounding joy. A happy surrender. Share a slice of pizza with the kid and you can feel it beaming out of his wide smile, fervent nods, and jolly demeanour.
You can (and should) listen to Travella’s recorded music, like the Mr Mixondo LP from 2022 or his latest and appropriately titled TWENDE EP (“let’s go” in Swahili), but you’ll surely miss a bit of the magic. It’s hard to fully embrace the “happiness, dance, and unity” that Rosa mentioned from your headphones (though not impossible). It’s meant to be played for an audience and Travella is hard at work moving across the globe to do so, bringing singeli as far as New Zealand and China, Paris and Vilvoorde. “I thank my God that he gave me this talent,” Travella says, “singeli took me far from Tanzania.” Here’s to thanking God together for the antidote. Here, we don’t pray on our knees, but on our feet. In the words of Nyege Nyege, “it’s clear that this is Travella’s time and the best we can do is keep up.”
Try and keep up with DJ Travella and his music here.
And don’t forget to grab your spot to Nyege Nyege Festival in Bordeaux to get the full live experience.
