A voice recorded in a restaurant in Addis Ababa enters a track made for movement. Kebenesh, who worked chopping onions there, sang a melody that Faizal Mostrixx carried into Onions and Love. Around it he built electronic space and layered rhythm. The encounter does not turn a person’s everyday singing into an anonymous texture. Mostrixx names her and describes wanting to retain something of its Ethiopian setting while bringing in influences from his own Baganda musical world. The track opens his 2023 album Mutations with a question he returns to throughout it: what happens when a sound encountered in one life is given room to move in another?
Mostrixx is a Ugandan producer, dancer and choreographer. In a 2023 interview with Electronic Sound, he said Afrofuturism describes a way of placing his roots in a modern perspective, with past, present and future heard together. His music does not require a spacecraft to be speculative. It uses recording, sampling and the body’s response to rhythm to ask how traditions might change without being treated as finished relics. The album title is exact: a mutation is a transformation, not an erasure of everything that came before.
That point matters because Mutations draws from many places. Uganda’s distinct musical practices do not become a generic “African sound” simply because the record uses electronics. Mostrixx speaks about the Baganda, Bagisu and Acholi as sources of rhythmic thinking and works with sounds from Ethiopia and elsewhere. The album’s nine tracks are joined by the sensibility of a choreographer who hears sound as an invitation to move. They do not pretend that a singer in Addis Ababa, a Northern Ugandan dance and a Kinshasa guitar line have one interchangeable origin.
A dancer learns to build sound
Mostrixx’s mother was a dancer and musician. He watched rehearsals as a child, seeing a performance take shape through repetition before an audience ever arrived. His father brought home recordings from journeys as a truck driver and understood electrical equipment well enough to show his son how it worked. These details from the Electronic Sound interview explain why movement and machines entered his practice together. A rhythm was never only a file stored on a device. It was something bodies rehearsed, adjusted and carried into a room.
He first found professional opportunities as a dancer. Work with the Kampala breakdance collective Tabu Flo encouraged combinations of hip-hop and traditional movement. He was also given responsibility for finding and mixing music for performances. The shift from choosing tracks to making them came through software such as FruityLoops and later Ableton Live. In a first-person conversation with Trial and Error Collective, he describes experimenting with voice, piano, samples and synthesizers, sometimes beginning with a movement or imagined scene before finding its sound.
That sequence is important. A producer trained only at a screen might start with a loop and ask whether it is interesting to hear. Mostrixx can ask what a body wants to do with it. The track may need space for a turn, a change in weight, a pause or a sudden acceleration. He does not always compose from choreography first, but his description of music as a journey makes clear that movement is part of the measure of a successful piece. The record’s form can grow from physical expectation rather than from a fixed template of dance music.
His early access to recording tools also shaped a sense of possibility. He remembered discovering that a computer could generate beats and learning by testing what software would do. That curiosity belongs to the same practice as sampling older recordings. A machine is not a symbol of a future that has displaced local knowledge. It is a means of reworking material he already values. The tool lets him alter timing, density and atmosphere; the judgment of what those changes mean remains with the musician and the dancers whose experience informs him.
Mutations and its voices
Mutations appeared on Glitterbeat in May 2023. The Resident Advisor review describes Onions and Love as a meeting of Kebenesh’s recorded vocal, open synthesizer space and active polyrhythm. The track’s title places a mundane task beside an emotion large enough to fill a song. Mostrixx’s own account of the encounter is similarly attentive to the ordinary: each day can offer a new sound, and a kitchen worker’s singing may be musically arresting without being staged as a professional audition. The finished piece carries that chance meeting into a different listening situation.
The ethical question of sampling a person is always present. A voice can be treated as raw material and stripped of its origin. Mostrixx’s interviews give Kebenesh a name, place and role in the music. That recognition does not settle every question about circulation and compensation, but it changes how a listener hears the track. The voice comes from a human encounter in Addis Ababa, not from a timeless, unlocated archive. The production around it asks how closeness to its source can coexist with musical transformation.
Loosely, featuring the Lesothan performer Morena Leraba, emerged from the same Ethiopian session. Resident Advisor describes an impromptu contribution that prompted Mostrixx to add layers and make the track denser. Its video, directed by Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa, sets strong deliberate movement beside soft pastel fabrics, as the Trial and Error interviewer notes. Mostrixx responded by discussing the coexistence of strength and softness in a person, and by crediting the director’s imagination. The visual extension of the song makes a bodily relation explicit: sound can make movement feel forceful and yielding within the same passage.
A record this layered can invite lazy language about fusion. The word suggests ingredients poured together until their origins disappear. Mostrixx’s process is more specific. He records a voice in one setting, works with a collaborator in another and draws on rhythms with their own histories. A track can hold these materials in tension. The listener can sense where a melodic line leaves space for percussion, where a familiar dance pulse is interrupted, or where a vocal phrase carries a local accent that production has not flattened. The interest lies in these relationships, not in a catalogue of influences.
The archive enters the club
Back to Tanzania uses historical field recordings alongside live instrumental material and digital production. Mostrixx told Trial and Error Collective that he sampled recordings from the 1950s and played some instruments himself, using tools including Ableton Push and MIDI keyboards. Resident Advisor hears chopped voices, thumb piano, quick synthesizer figures and heavier pads in the track. The archive is therefore neither pasted unchanged into a club beat nor hidden inside a seamless new surface. It becomes one layer among materials made in different times.
The International Library of African Music gave him access to historical recordings after his early independent release. In the Electronic Sound interview, he described revisiting those samples to find sounds that could work in new atmospheres. The method raises a difficult artistic question: how can an old recording be treated as a living musical resource rather than as an artifact removed from its original performers? Mostrixx’s answer is practical and sonic. He puts the material into motion, changing its surroundings so a contemporary listener may hear a rhythm or timbre as active rather than sealed in a catalogue.
This does not mean the past is available without responsibility. An archival recording has people, circumstances and a chain of custody behind it, even if a modern listener knows few of their names. Mostrixx’s strongest tracks keep that tension audible. A fragment from one era meets a programmed texture from another. The join invites curiosity about both, rather than claiming a single timeless tradition. The producer’s agency lies in arranging the encounter; the older performers’ contributions remain part of the work’s substance.
The title Back to Tanzania points toward travel and return, but the track’s movement is not a simple journey to an unchanged place. Its construction moves among a field recording, live instrumental playing and a contemporary electronic vocabulary. “Back” may be an invitation to listen again rather than a claim that the music can recover an untouched past. In that sense the track stages one of the album’s recurring tensions: a tradition can be revisited while the conditions of hearing it continue to change.
Dance as a way of hearing history
The album’s rhythmic heart includes Mostrixx’s interest in kadodi, associated with an initiation ceremony among the Bagisu of eastern Uganda. He described it to Electronic Sound as fast, syncopated and hypnotic, a pattern that can energize a group and help people endure an intense ritual moment. In the Trial and Error conversation, he emphasizes its repeated drums, groove and capacity to sustain motion. He is not presenting a ceremonial performance as a club track. He studies the rhythmic forces within it and asks what they can do when rearranged.
Syncopation unsettles an expected beat. A dancer may feel an accent arrive just before or after the point at which their body was ready for it. Mostrixx can make that displacement a source of energy, especially when electronic sounds provide a frame that is stable enough for the older rhythmic pattern to cut across it. The result can feel both grounded and unpredictable. This is one reason the music rewards repeated listening as well as dancing: a pulse that seemed obvious on first hearing may prove to contain several competing directions.
The title track Mutations draws on the Bwola royal dance of Northern Uganda, according to the Resident Advisor close reading. Its placement in a record shaped for electronic listening tests what happens when a dance associated with one social setting is heard through another. The transformation is neither pure preservation nor a clean break. Mostrixx’s own background as a choreographer makes the question especially pointed. He knows a dance as a relation between bodies, musicians and a gathering, not simply a pattern to be transferred into software. His production works on that relation by proposing a new environment for its rhythmic logic.
A critic can hear a future-facing quality in the album without claiming that all Ugandan rhythmic practices are destined to become electronic music. The point is choice. Mostrixx selects, cuts, records, layers and performs. Others may choose different paths for the same traditions. The living status of a musical inheritance is visible precisely because it can be engaged with rather than treated as a museum object whose correct form has already been fixed for every generation.
Across the album’s map
Other tracks widen the record’s geography. The Resident Advisor review hears Kinshasa-inflected guitar figures in Muzukulu and a slower, more spacious close in Afro Aliens. Those choices prevent Mutations from holding one intensity for nine tracks. A run of fast percussion can make stillness or a slower pulse feel more deliberate when it arrives. The closing title’s extraterrestrial language also need not be taken as the album’s primary definition of Afrofuturism. The speculative work has already been happening through its treatment of recordings, bodies and time.
The album does not ask a listener to master the origins of every sound before enjoying it. Its movement can be felt first. But the sources enrich a second encounter. Knowing that one voice was recorded in a restaurant, another passage draws on a library recording and a rhythm has ceremonial associations changes what the ear can attend to. It also reminds listeners that tracks reaching a global platform were made through particular local meetings and permissions. Mostrixx’s music travels, but it is never placeless.
His 2022 Transitions EP offers a nearby point of comparison. The title already suggests changing states, and Electronic Sound describes it as immersive and expansive. Mutations makes that interest more explicit through its album-wide sequence and its varied source material. The progression should not be mistaken for a straight line from “traditional” to “modern.” Both stages of his work are contemporary acts of selection. Their difference lies in how he develops his compositional range, not in leaving one part of himself behind.
The record’s public life also includes live performance. Mostrixx told Trial and Error that he wanted to celebrate the album through music and dance festivals. A stage performance can return electronic arrangements to a body in real time, opening new decisions about tempo, gesture and audience attention. This is a meaningful loop in his practice: dance contributed to the sound, the sound shaped an album, and the album could generate more dance. A recorded track is one state in that cycle rather than the final form of an idea.
A future with an audible lineage
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams editorial uses fashion imagery and conversation to ask how different histories might alter what people can imagine now. Mostrixx works through another sensory route. He brings a recorded voice, a dance pattern or a guitar figure into a newly constructed listening space. Both approaches depend on the specificity of what is carried forward. A future made from anonymous signs of “Africa” would have far less force than one that lets listeners recognize distinct people, places and techniques.
Mostrixx has said that Afrofuturism names innovation in an African sense. Mutations gives that statement a practical form. The studio equipment does not stand outside the tradition, waiting to improve it. The rhythmic inheritance does not stand outside contemporary life, waiting to be displayed. Both are resources a musician can use, question and change. What sounds futuristic is the new relation he makes among them, and the room it gives a dancer to move differently.
The record begins with Kebenesh’s voice and ends with a track called Afro Aliens. Between them lie field recordings, collaborators, ceremonial rhythms, synthetic textures and the choices of a producer who first learned the force of music through bodies in rehearsal. The distance covered is wide, but it does not require the past to vanish. Mostrixx’s art lets sound travel across time while retaining the human encounter that set it in motion. Its future is not a destination announced from above. It is the next movement a listener can hear forming inside the beat.