Diaspora in dub: an interview with mundu lawaai

mundu lawaai's stage performance—which will be presented as part of U? at De Nijverheid on Saturday, 7 November–exists somewhere between live composition, cypher and rave. There is no single fixed centre: each musician brings their own history and artistry, while the music emerges through listening, reaction and collective improvisation.

We called up the lively band members gabi, Alek and Kroes in their headquarters, Studio Tumbuh at the NDSM Werf in Amsterdam-Noord, while HERDER dialed in in from London.

gabi, what were you looking for when you started mapping out mundu lawaai? What did you have in mind at the time?

gabi
The seed for mundu lawaai was planted in 2023, when me and Alek met for the first time. I played a set at {Amsterdam venue} Sexyland.

The gig was perhaps really horrible, but Alek saw me perform and came up with the idea: "What if we had an improvising band that we dub live?"

Cut to 2025: Tim Sprangers of Space is the Place invites me to form a new band through SITProductions. Something sparked in my mind, like "Oh, I'm going to bring him this idea of a group that's improvising, but very beat-oriented within a ‘dance music’ language, everyone's being dubbed."

I had certain insights from going out with a group of maracatu baque solto that I've been joining every Carnaval since 2024. They're called Maracatu Leão Misterioso, and they have these "caboclos de lança" characters that are carrying up to seven bells on their back. There's sometimes 60 of them per group, so during Carnaval there's maybe a thousand of them in several small rural towns of the North East of Pernambuco. They are so fucking loud, noisy as hell!

I got obsessed with this world of noise that those bells create acoustically. I just had this moment where I thought there's an entire universe of noise in these bells and they are just as noisy as power electronics, or a rave that you would hear in Amsterdam. Gabber, hardcore, you know. There is a world of noise inside this sound, which relates to other noises around the globe.

That’s also how the name for the group was born, merging languages: "mundu" being a more phonetic form of "mundo", "world" in Portuguese, Papiamentu or Cape-Verdean creole. And "lawaai" being both the Dutch word for "noise" – annoying noise, really disruptive – but also phonetically similar to "lá vai" which means "there it goes". In Bumba Meu Boi, multiple songs generally start with "lá va, là vai" and I just had this thing in my head. They are basically singing a song that says "we are going, we are starting our procession on this path, because we are together, we are strong and nobody can stop us." That's where it comes from. From this proximity through sound. Noise opening paths.

From your perspective: what are the aspects that had to be connected to this specific culture closer to your roots? And what was the more direct influence of the scene around you in Amsterdam, including the people that are involved in the band.

My vision of traditional Brazilian music, being the music of a diaspora, is that this tradition already comes from reinvention.

Especially within the context of the transatlantic slave trade and the creation of new identities in Latin America, in the United States and so on, which very much interconnected.

This diaspora is already a point of connection between, for example, the footwork produced by Teklife and DJ Rashad in Chicago, and Brazilian (baile) funk or something that I would hear in Pernambuco's coco de roda. Completely different timelines and geographies, but they're related through a diaspora.

This brings me to the conclusion that the world has gone through several movements of diaspora, of migration, to form new collective identities of sounds.

Amsterdam is a post-colonial city where several of these diasporas are passing through, a city that has been responsible for forcing these diasporas into existence. It's a place where these things happen. Where somebody like myself can take a 200-years-old rhythm from Maracatu Estrela Brilhante de Igarassú to a drummer who grew up here with a mom from Dominica, listening to bouyon and soca. And he then adds a bouyon beat and then we'll start overlapping triplets. Then somebody who's coming from Indonesia and has listened to dub all of his life is gonna come and dub it! And I mean, a rapper from Zwolle, inspired and mentored by Rico from {Dutch rap legends} Opgezwolle, is joining us.

You can have all these people in a band because all of them are living through a re-diaspora in a sense. We are all displaced from the place that we're from no, even if you're Dutch, you know, like you're seeing your identity being completely diluted.

Alek
Also, for our generation it feels like we are part of the diaspora of our own past, because of how subculture music got lost. With how technology is going, there is constant accumulation and streams of influence.

You get access to everything, and everything gets lost in the process culturally.

gabi
Yeah, I think it's important to focus on the fact that this band somehow happens specifically at this time and in this location in Amsterdam.

Alek
It's really unique to this moment and place in time.

gabi
We're using these two techniques: relating to Dutch instant composition, but then using dub, which is a Jamaican avant-garde studio technique, which in turn has impacted the birth of hip-hop and the history of pop music everywhere nowadays.

So what is being made in the underground of pop music, and who can claim this world?

With all this conceptual thinking around the project: how did the rest of the band experience the beginning of mundu lawaai?

Kroes
I met gabi you when I just moved to Amsterdam in 2024. I went to a couple their gigs and we started hanging out, and then they asked me to play. For me, playing bass and doing electronics, it's a big thing that we're a band playing physical instruments, but also have the dubbing and the sampler. We're sitting nicely in-between both worlds, bridging electronic techniques and improvisation.

gabi

There's no tradition and there's no avant-garde: we are creating a new language informed by all of these things.

Actually, I remember you [Kroes] told me this when I sent this meme in our group chat: “there's no tradition and there's no avant-garde, just bass!”. We are creating a language informed by all of these things.

HERDER
I met gabi during a residency we did in Cinetol last year. I'm coming from a theater/performance art background and I've been rapping my whole life. During the residency, I got more room to experiment with rap and cyphering. I'm really inspired by grime and by the UK scene, which is already really close to dub. I was experimenting and figuring out how to perform in stage settings, because I'm used to more theatrical or experimental settings. Then they asked me if I wanted to join this band and I was like "fuck yeah". I've always wanted to perform with live music. It's been a really interesting journey of improvising with texts I already wrote and with new texts in the moment, making a palette of lyrics, sort of.

For me as an MC, it's really interesting to be an instrument, instead of a frontman who is talking about himself the whole time. Because that's basically what for me, rap in the Netherlands is like. Knowing when to be silent and then listening to the music, it's adding a whole new dimension for me.

I enjoy how we're really different from each other, but then we somehow have a love for the same fast and noisy world, and we're becoming creatures when we're performing on stage. I remember the first time we played together in the studio. It was a really, really like exciting moment. Do you remember what I'm talking about?

gabi, Kroes, Alek
YEAH, shout out Studio Tumbuh!

Alek
Speaking of which, mundu lawaai gave further meaning to the studio where I'm working and recording with artists. When gabi mentioned this band, the studio was just finished. So it became a physical space for the project. Its home.

Especially since we are all from different cultures and in our bubbles, Studio Tumbuh functions as an archipelago, with bridges connecting our respective islands.

Take, for example, Chaerin Im, who's an incredible jazz pianist and keyboardist, highly knowledgeable of electronic dance music, really glues and expands our ideas with her synth textures and own harmonic-melodic world.

mundu lawaai's logo
Resembling both a speaker and the Bakongo cosmogram, and representing transition of life, death and ancestry

Kroes
To HERDER’s point, I think the first time we listened to the sketches gabi made, which were, like, core ideas, just some beats... We listened to them for a couple of minutes and then we were "oh, let's just play it." And it worked.

gabi
I remember our drummer Niels had a lot of say in that because he's also somebody who improvises. He’s a great listener, but he's really somebody who's holding it together. We had this first rehearsal a bit before the premiere at Minimal Music Festival. It was great that we could be there, in this kind of high art context, which is also the point of this project. Especially because it's also suitable for the club, an illegal rave, or wherever.

For the upcoming show at U? Festival, there will be gamelan percussionist Krishna Sutedja playing with you. How did that come about and how is the sound evolving with him?

gabi
I met Krishna in 2021 or 2022. I was taking some courses at the musicology department at UvA {Universiteit van Amsterdam} while I was studying at the Conservatorium.

I took a great class on ‘sonic archivism’, which had me thinking about what I do. A "breathing life into archives" kind of practice.

One of our professors was Barbara Titus. She does great work with MeLê Yamomo, an Indonesian researcher who is basically reintegrating the Jaap Kunst Archive, which is a super colonial, early 20th century archive of music recorded in Indonesia and other regions in South East Asia. Because of Barbara Titus I got invited to join an extracurricular Balinese gamelan class at UvA, and my teacher was Krishna. We stayed in contact for a bit.

I did maybe a year of gamelan, but couldn't commit so deeply. I would see Krishna perform with different formations, for instance, at {Amsterdam venue} Skate Cafe, where he would be playing next to a DJ. So when we had a bigger gig at {Rotterdam’s} WORM and Garage Noord {Amsterdam} last summer, I invited him as the seventh member of our band. In Utrecht, he'll be joining us, too.

He's playing percussions instruments that are not organized in the Western 12-tone tuning, and deepens our intent of making music that is not even dependent on pitch conventions, but rather sound samples, more rhythm and groove. With that comes the argument of using an 800-years-old instrument to play footwork from the 2010s, or playing a rhythm that was created in Brazil 200 years ago, shaped by the experiences of people who were trafficked from the African continent, who had been playing percussive music for so long. That's kind of the whole point.

Alek, what is it like it to live-dub all these instruments and different frequencies?

Alek
Oh, for me, it's a treasure! When gabi and I met, I was performing with my virtual instruments and now I bring a little mixer with me to dub all this stuff the analog way. A more traditional dub performer would do that with their reggae stems or studio recordings. With our live-improvised elements, I get to not only dub a fixed repertoire, but I can feedback my effects and my energy to them to achieve get the result that I want. It's even more of a conduction and I really love the creative challenge of it.

mundu lawaai performs at U? on Saturday, 7 November, bringing brand new cassette tapes and a special guest. The same night, gabi also performs with the duo Brigadera in the COSMOS Foyer.