Ibaaku
Loving the Alien
PHOTO BY ZIZI LAZER
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Dakar is a culture of different influences coming from everywhere. When I try to define it, in my heart, I might also be defining myself because it’s in myself. It’s a very colorful city. The people are so expressive and so beautiful, so stylish. It’s really inspiring on every level. From the spiritual to the physical, to the metaphysical. For me, and for my music, it’s the most important thing. To have that variety and diversity to challenge you all the time. You are in that continuous flow of so many things around you, and you try to focus. It’s the whole universe and, for me, the source of what I’m feeling. Dakar is the source of what I’m doing.
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I don’t know if it’s in the city’s DNA. Maybe it’s more a matter of that DNA being in this generation. A matter of how the world is working right now. The artists, the youths, are really sensitive to that, how the world is switching for the artist. How we have a lot of means to express ourselves. Maybe in the future we will really say that, ‘It’s in Dakar’s DNA’, but right now we’re switching it. We are working through all these possibilities we have as artists, as people, as human beings. But it’s more about the era we live in. It isn’t just happening in Dakar, it’s happening everywhere in the world.
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The first thing that comes to mind are the stories of people around me. It can be other artists, my family, friends you know, whatever, they all have stories. And I don’t enjoy just their words but their worlds, their individual worlds. At first you don’t know at all how it’s working but you listen and you look and suddenly you can see their individual world. That really inspires and motivates me.
PHOTO BY AKIBA HAIOZI
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First of all, I’m really proud to be associated with that movement with its great history, and to be recognized as a person pushing it forward. It’s a responsibility for me to bring my perspective from my continent about those subjects about our future, our mythology. What is our perspective for
the present?
What are we bringing to the table? What are the solutions that we imagine? How do we imagine the next year, the next century? For me, that means a lot of possibilities. It means bridges between the diaspora and the continent. It means a lot to me.
«There are actual aliens, you know. They’re around.»
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[laughs] “Both.
Certainly both. The album Alien Cartoon was the birth of the Ibaaku character, and aliens are very much a part of him. He’s a hybrid, his mom is an alien and his father is a human. The assemblage of that refer to a lot of things. My personal history, the idea of difference, the idea of the other. You can read the alien as immigrant or you can read the alien as an actual alien. There are actual aliens, you know. They’re around.
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Actually, my next thing will be a collaborative project with the guys I’ve been on the road with these past few years. BenRichard, doing the visuals, and Alf, who’s a sound engineer but also an electronic musician. We are trying to concoct something. But, yes, at the same time I’m working on the next Ibaaku project. It will be an extension of what I did on Alien Cartoon but very different. I’m not saying it’s a new style but it’s a different aspect of what I did with the first one.
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Yes. That is how I want to evolve in art and music. Nothing inspires me more than other people, hearing the stories of other people and being around their stories. So, I will always collaborate because it always brings something new. There are no boundaries for whatever is coming in the future.
