Jantra: the Sudanese synth wizard waging raves against war
There’s a storm breaking out over the rugged expanse of Sudan. It is so severe that it looks like tinfoil in a microwave. It blazes ahead, barely noticed. Permeating the flashes and rumble of nature is the racket of gunfire, heavy artillery, and specialised disco synth. The man behind the ethereal music contrasting the chaos is Jantra. He is a pariah in every sense: off the grid, an outlaw, and musically adrift, fishing celestial sounds from the firmament via the Fashaga underground. He has no idea he is the subject of growing repute; perhaps he never will.
“Fighting broke out in Sudan in mid-April,” a BBC newsreader announces. “We’ve seen it on the streets and in the sky; hundreds have died, thousands have been evacuated, millions remain caught in the conflict.” Amid this glaring display of despairing carnage, it is often humble human defiance that proves hardest to see. Incongruous with the images of crumbling streets besieged by machine-gun fighters are the reports and pictures we’ve received of Jantra, hunched over an array of personalised synths, a grin akin to sunrise beaming from his concentrated face, and a jostle of awed revellers dancing afore his musical altar at a secret party somewhere in the rural sweep of Sudan.
Since Sudan declared independence from joint British and Egyptian rule in 1956, turmoil has ruled the roost. The military have been in power more often than civilian governments, and coups have been countless. There has even been a religious civil war between the Muslim north and Christian south that resulted in the separatist nation of South Sudan being established in 2011. Alas, throughout all of this, the military still clung to power.
In 2019, there was a civilian uprising that looked to bring back democratic governance. It was regarded as a proud triumph, with the regime pledging to relinquish power and oversee the transition. But democracy never arrived. Further public unrest prompted the arrest of the civilian leader while the military regained full power. However, public opinion remains fixed on democracy. Thus, a bloody impasse has arisen whereby democracy is sworn to arrive, but a fraction between the military and a paramilitary group has led to bloodshed in the name of two respective leaders hoping to deliver a transition to democracy that benefits their own interests.
This hodgepodge mess of inevitable hardship is where Sudan has eternally found itself. The ramshackle chaos has pervaded over despair and tragedy, and yet, it is also the defining factor of the defiant cultural landscape where Jantra plies his art. “Most keyboards in Sudan are imported from Egypt or Dubai,” Ostinato Records founder Vik Sohonie tells me. “You can usually purchase them from select dealers or from the Omdurman market, where there is a large mechanic workshop that fixes and tweaks Sudanese keyboards to fit Sudanese sound aesthetics.” This musical underground hardwires folk traditions into the influx of technology brought over from less hostile regions.
“It’s like a custom chop shop for synths,” Sohonie continues. “Keyboards are expensive and imported infrequently, so the one you have needs constant upkeep.” Jantra’s is honed in this partisan musical workshop in an unassuming back alley where his particular ethereal tone is affixed. Mixing the percussive folk style of the area with something rather more trance-like, he has harnessed a sound that provides a complex backdrop of euphoric escapism from the war waging a few fields over.
Thus, he finds himself invited, via covert means, by his cult following “to play at weddings, bachelor parties, and street parties in the rural areas of Sudan. Most people think of electronic music as an urban affair, but few in the capital know him. His following is among the countryside, the rural area, the farmlands,” in essence, the areas where freedom and liberation, at least on a personal level, still abound.
Now, thanks to Ostinato Records, he has a global release, Synthesised Sudan: Astro-Nubian Electronic Jaglara Dance Sounds from the Fashaga Underground. Although, for a while, he was entirely unaware that vinyl sporting his face were hitting record shops the world over. Word has thankfully now reached him. However, “he wasn’t immediately aware when it was announced because the war had broken out just a week after, and he was unreachable. He is already difficult to reach as he rarely carries a phone with him, and he doesn’t have WhatsApp or any messaging apps,” Sohonie explains. “We’ve been unable to send him a physical copy because of the ongoing conflict, but he’s been able to hear it on YouTube.”
His engagement is fleeting. Royalties are paid to a Western Union in his hometown of Gedarif, which remains just about functional. Jantra collects them as and when. And that is just about all Ostinato Records hear from him. In fact, it is all many people hear of him. Part of this is because of the state of the nation, but much of it also has to do with his character. To book him, you have to know him. This is a necessity for his safety and that of the revellers huddled somewhere in the sheltered reaches of rurality. But it is also suspected that Jantra favours this simplified earnest purpose of music.
“He is extremely humble, unassuming, soft-spoken,” Sohonie says of his off-grid star. “Head down, fingers tearing up the keyboard, a small smile on his face, does everything to earn money for his family. A man of the countryside. There is an innocence about him that you can perhaps even hear in the self-same childlike innocence of some of his music. Even for someone with a cult following and packed parties, he is humble, patient, and as modest as they come.” Indeed, even the jazzed complexity of his music, the atonal layering that defies anything Western, speaks of a naive exploration of sound, unbothered by norms.
This is even more apparent when I ask about his songwriting process: “He doesn’t write songs – ha! He just freestyles as he plays for parties for hours and hours on end. We had to sit down with him and choose on-the-fly melodies that he had generated to craft narrative arcs of songs. We had to literally make each song from scratch using a selection of his freestyled melodies and then work with them to turn them into proper tracks with dance record sensibilities. It was a process, but he was extremely patient and cooperative.”
What has been crafted by Jantra, Sohonie, and Janto Koite at Ostinato Records with Synthesised Sudan is not only a singular sound that envelops you in the same escapism that transforms thunderstruck pastures in the rural corners of a war-torn nation into a cosmic rave but also a statement of defiance. “He plays his music only to support his family,” I am told. “But if there’s one message, it’s to let the world know that Sudan is capable of producing highly innovative things.” From the outskirts of the outskirts, ingenuity is subverting the scourge that Sudan faces and illuminating a collective future.
