One could consider 'Kololi', the long-player debut by Ugandan Nihiloxica, a collaboration between British jazz drummer and producer Jacob Maskell-Key aka Spooky-J and producer Peter Jones aka pq, and the four-piece Nilotika Cultural Ensemble from Kampala, to be a distant cousin of Kinshasa's congotronics-scene. But where Congolese projects mainly experiment with likembes and lokole/lokombe drums, 'Kaloli', Luganda for the African marabou (large bait birds covered with amorphous boils and tumors, which can be found all over the country, and in Kampala, with its metropolitan pollution, scower the rotting mountains of waste), mostly features typically Ugandan percussion, completed with the dark electro-vibes of the two Brits. A traditional Bugandese drum set is composed of the engalabi (a Ugandan variant of the West African djembe, played here by Alimansi Wanzu Aineomugisha and Jamiru Mwanje), the namunjoloba (a set of four high-pitched drums, here the domain of Henry Kasoma), the empuuny (three bass drums) played by Henry Isabirye, sometimes accompagnied by ensaasi, Ugandan shakers. Together they invite the listener on a trip through Uganda's rhythmic landscape: 'Busoga' from the east of the country, 'Bwola' from the north, and 'Gunjula' from the central region of Buganda. The album also features three interludes, recordings of rehearsal sessions that took place in Jinja, near the location of the annual Nyege Nyege Festival. For the last of those three interludes, closing track '170819', Mwanje 'Jally' Jamiru swapped his engalabi for a homemade flute, creating an intimate outro in which his flute playing is accompanied by the chirping of the countless crickets in Jinja. Seductive futurism from the heart of the African continent!