Electric Mandingue

Traditions revive.

Electric Mandingue aims at turning 13th century traditional music from West Africa – the Mandingue music, into electric music of all sorts.

It was a project made for fun by me and Tumanin Ting, a passionate drummer from Hong Kong. As djembe players, we noticed that the traditional form of Mandingue music is heart-capturing in a live performance setting, yet much less so when played on a normal mobile device. The reason is that it is hard to reproduce the sense of gigantic volume and resonance in vast spaces (which is crucial for this kind of music) on a phone unless you have hi-fi level headsets.

So, we had this idea of translating these classic masterpieces into modern language – Trap, Dub Step, New Age, Classical, etc. And for each genre translated, we will wrap it into a tiny HTML5 page that is easy to share.

The cover represents the first song we made. Djole (pronouced the same as in Chinese characters: 周禮), a cheerful tune played on festivals in Guinea and Sierra Leone, is rearranged into a piece of traditional Chines Folk music that is apt for playing during the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year. And of course, in traditional Chinese New Year, we put our blessings in a red envolop and give it to others. You can check the demo version of this song below: