Jean Hugues Kabuiku

As Black intellectuals rarely live in a vacuum, it’s no surprise that there is a thread connecting Black art and Black critical theory throughout the years. The aim of this article is to clarify some of those intellectual connections in the context of dance music, and perceived influences of Afro-Pessimism (and affiliated theories) in dance music discourse. More specifically, we intend here to describe dance music as an umbrella of musical innovations which spread across the African diaspora....

A plague rave in Paris this summer raised a question for me, how can you be a participant in a scene that pretends to be the heirs of the 90s rave era only to dilute the craft of DJing into a rat-race? Trying to individually propel your career in a pandemic, when 99.9% of your colleagues are out of a job and potentially spreading a virus in a suburb of Paris where the population is a BPOC majority. The recent backlash about Lieuron’s rave really laid bare the divide in class here. As 2000 par...

(Credits : Pictures from The Matrix directed by the Wachowskis 1999)
This is a follow up from my first essay “What is the future for music after COVID-19?” I was lucky to be able to exchange with DeForrest Brown, Jr. a New York-based theorist, journalist, and curator, with who I’m now doing a series of conversations with, about the music industry and the state of affairs that you can follow on my patreon. I will also be joined by Rich Jensen, ex Subpop and the Co-op Executive for Resonate Co-...

Features
Jean-Hugues Kabuiku gets candid with The Baron about dance music culture in 2020
The COVID-19 crisis and Minneapolis uprising have accelerated conversations around race in the music industry.
As a Black producer and DJ, I find myself at the intersection of those conversations and as we go further into the pandemic and the UK and continental Europe is implementing new safety measures, the more fragile sections of society are expected to be even more resilient. At this point we risk se...

Jean-Hugues Kabuiku checks in with the multi-talented Christelle Oyiri.
Discussion around the origins of techno and the whitewashing of electronic music have been going on for a while now. The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated conversations around race and equality, not only in our music scene but across the board. I'm a Black producer who used to operate in the French scene. It's a country with the biggest Black population in Europe and it has a very raw and recent colonial history.
In France,...

Techno, club edits and apocalyptic scenes defined one of Berlin's newly-legal open-airs.
On Saturday at Else, Salon zur Wilden Renate's Spree-side open-air venue, a crowd gathered for one of the few legal parties recently authorized by city officials. Berlin has been experiencing an uptick in illegal parties since March 13th, when the city's clubs closed their doors to curb the spread of COVID-19. As a compromise, local government thought it would be a smart move to allow some early-start ope...

In this essay, I will try to highlight the contour of an alternative to the financialization of music. in a COVID world patience is running out, we have witnessed organizations and individuals who called themselves progressive dodging accountability when asked to take responsibility for their oppressive behavior. Meanwhile, some corporations are thriving and millionaires getting richer at such a scale that in 2020 we have the “honor” to have the first trillionaire.
As put by Zarinah Agnew in ...