Yalla Miku’s frenetic and uplifting debut album is a genre twister, with musicians from North and East Africa coming together with various musical alchemists from Geneva’s burgeoning and experimentally minded, global music scene. It’s a thrilling mix of Moroccan gnawa, haunting guembri melodies and krar riffs with shoots of house and electronica and krautrock grooves and ultimately a testament to the community led, punk approach that many creatives from the Bongo Joe Record label, and beyond, adhere to.

The idea however was not to follow the tired and sometimes clichèd ways of “fusion” music by appropriating non-Western styles and collaborating with foreign artists to create a seamlessly blended sound. Quite the opposite: Yalla Miku honor this meeting of cultures by specifically drawing attention to those points of contrast between different traditions, voices, and instruments, creating a lively, polyphonic conversation that gives each musician the freedom to improvise and tell their own story.