There are no themes to No Chambers scene reports, but if there was, this post would have two. First, there was a ton of great writing this month on music scenes across Africa and the Middle East, to the point where every seven out of the eight articles featured are focused on that region. Second, those writers went deep on the political and economic dynamics shaping music scenes in these places, particularly (and unfortunately) the difficulties that challenging conditions along these dimensions can create for musicians just trying to make art. There’s some great contributions from Bandcamp (as always), an especially prolific turn for OkayAfrica, and an incredible piece on underground music in Amman from a site I’d never heard of before but is quickly becoming one of my favorite spots for thoughtful coverage of music and culture in the Middle East.
If you’re the type of person who likes going beyond a tracklist and and gets excited by phrases like “the political economy of culture,” this is your month. (Although if you also want the tracklist, that’s still there at the end!)
The Album
Xiuhtezcatl, TONATIUH (US/Mexico)
This month’s featured album comes not from the articles in the Report but from rapper and environmental activist Xiuhtezcatl Roske-Martinez, whose impressive electo-punk/cumbia collab with Susobrino I discovered via Beehive’s follow-worth Latin America - Best New Music playlist. Xiuhtezcatl’s 2025 solo album is more stripped-down hip hop, lighter in sound but heavy in lyrics. Across backing tracks that range from flamenco to boom bap to corridos tumbados, Xiuhtezcatl walks through families wrestling with generational trauma and communities damaged by America’s callous treatment of its indigenous peoples. The sheer gravity of these topics would be enough to press the air out of most albums, but while Xiuhtezcatl applies enough pressure to keep his listeners short of breath, his beats and flows have a buoyancy that prevents the record from sinking under its own weight.
The Report
Local Zambian music genres had something of a moment last year, driven by new compilations and coverage of the Zamrock subgenre that bubbled up from the country’s working class communities in the 70s. This past month, music historian Mathew Tembo was in The Conversation covering a different Zambian-born genre called Zed Beats. Arising in the late 80s, Zed Beats developed as the HIV/AIDS epidemic was hollowing out Zambia’s music scene, claiming the lives of a generation of musicians working in Zamrock or another regional genre called Kalindula. By the 90s, access to cheap music production software had facilitated a rapid expansion of the country’s music scene that crystallized into a hometown genre called Zed Beats. Presenting as a mixture of rap, Afrobeats, and other popular genres, the defining feature of Zed Beats seems to be that it’s made in Zambia by Zambians. The genre primarily uses languages indigenous to Zambia, and its artists are now in high demand to record theme songs for local politicians.
Oli Warwick is in Bandcamp Daily writing about the Cuban DIY scene, a corner of the global music world that’s rarely heard over the charged political discourse surrounding the Caribbean island. Warwick doesn’t shy away from the political either, detailing the deprivations that artists — and Cubans generally — experience at the hands of an oppressive domestic government and enervating foreign blockade. Power cuts are common and transportation is sparse; many artists living on the island connect online simply because there’s no easy way to move between cities. Cuba’s artistic underground is particularly restricted by governmental constraints on what music can be played and where musicians can play it. In the last decade or so, however, festivals spotlighting independent musicians have been able to sneak in, and DIY labels, often supported by the broader Cuban diaspora, have risen up to champion the Cubans making music despite the obstacles. Like all coverage of DIY scenes operating in onerous conditions, the article has a double function as a celebration of music’s stunning resilience in the face of adversity.
Brian O. Otieno took the New York Times’s Kenya dispatch in a musical direction this month, covering the International Cowboys and Cowgirls Day festival in Nairobi. I usually don’t feature event coverage in these reports, but Kenya’s embrace of country music is something I’ve included before, and Otieno’s piece goes beyond an on-the-ground account to make some observations about the roots of country’s cross-continental popularity. This includes interviews with concert-goers reflecting on how cowboy stories resonate strongly with the pastoral culture of Kenya’s Maasai people, and how country music actually bears some similarities to Mugithi, a local folk genre that typically features a lone guitarist on vocals. All this helps explain why country has become so much more popular in Kenya than Nigeria, which the article notes is still largely dominated by Afrobeats. Between Kenya’s country fever and the massive popularity of the country-adjacent sertanejo in Brazil, this previously all-American genre is quickly becoming one of the United States’ most prominent exports (and, according to Bandcamp, increasingly queer as well)
OkayAfrica has long been a consistently strong source for wide-angled coverage of Africa’s various music scenes, and this month its writers were solidly on a tear. First up is a piece from Johannesburg correspondent Tšeliso Monaheng on the venues that are keeping Joburg’s hip hop scene vibrant and alive. Central to this story is Tony Dangler, the philosopher king of the Johannesburg rap community who, through cyphers hosted at the vinyl shop-slash-dispensary Bongz N’ Records, has been providing a platform for local lyricists to assemble and test out their skills. The piece is rich in on-scene details you can only get if you’re literally at the place, and Monaheng’s often rapturous reporting and occasional political asides gives his piece a vaguely New Journalist edge.
Next up, Ethiopia-based correspondent Beshou Gedamu provides a tour through the venues and creative spaces powering the music scene in Addis Ababa. Similar to many other cities across the world, these spaces are under attack by rapidly rising costs of living, causing more than a few to shutter in the last few years. In the Ethiopian capital specifically, it seems a number of venues were traditionally able to pay rent through partnerships with beer companies, but as the spending power of the city’s residents fell, these companies no longer found the partnerships beneficial and pulled out. The city’s creative class is far from beaten, though, and Gedamu’s piece runs through half a dozen azmari bet (traditional music house) and similar community spaces that have either been recently created or are still going strong. If you’re a music fan who also happens to be planning a trip to Addis Ababa soon, this article is a must-read.
The picture is looking more grim in nearby Egypt, where local writer Nūr Osman explores the drastic reduction in music venues and similar spaces for the arts in Cairo. Instead of (or really, in addition to) the omnipresent gentrification that’s constricting scenes elsewhere, Cairo’s plight is an intentional outcome of Egyptian president/dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s policy of “regime-security urbanism,” which is designed to throttle access to public spaces that could be leveraged for the type of mass mobilization the region saw during the Arab Spring. This has severely damaged the lively music scene Cairo enjoyed prior to El-Sisi’s rise, in which Cairenes from all economic backgrounds would gather for public events celebrating the arts. The situation is compounded by the city’s double-edged dependence on foreign funding (mostly European) to bankroll venues and events, a neo-colonial practice that prevented the scene from developing its own independent ecosystem. These foreign-funded spaces are now closing as European nations tighten their purses, leaving local musicians out in the metaphorical cold.
This latter issue is not limited to Egypt, as Amman-based writer Arran Walshe explains in a piece on the Jordanian capital’s underground music scene for the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). Walshe takes readers through the history of Amman’s underground, from government-led crackdowns on metal in the 1990s to the rise of an NGO-led and grant-based cultural economy in the 2000s, which created a number of the same problems that it did in Cairo. Walshe talks with several musicians about the downsides of catering to this new patrician class of foreign donors, particularly after October 2023, when many Palestinian artists taking refuge in Jordan need to navigate the moral conflict of taking money from representatives of countries that support Israel. At the same time, these artists are also facing pressure to distort their art into political statements, because commenting on the ongoing genocide in their homeland often drives more grant funding and clicks on social media. It’s an extremely well-developed article on a highly nuanced issue, one of several impressive pieces on music that MERIP published this month (see also Nafiseh Sharifi’s essay on Iranian protest music and Heidi S. Affi’s reporting on musical traditions in Northern Syria).
In another section of the Middle East, Megan Iacobini de Fazio contributes a piece to Bandcamp Daily on the Oran-based label Ahlem Édition, highlighting its efforts to preserve the legacy of Algeria’s raï and gasba music genres. Gasba is a proto-raï folk style named after the traditional Bedouin reed flute that features on almost all of its tracks. In the 1920s, gasba mixed with international influences imported into the port city or Oran, morphing into the working class genre known as “raï.” Both gasba and raï steadily accumulated more modern flourishes throughout the 20th century, including synths, drum machines, and a particularly effusive embrace of Autotune. A new compilation album released with the European label Hive Mind attempts to document this history, featuring ten modern gasba tracks that showcase the sonic range this genre has developed over the years.
