In Conversation With Rabudi West

Standing at the center of Nairobi’s alt nightlife, Rabudi is a great example of what it looks like when a creative cares about community and accessibility just as much as they care about their work. Before this session, I’d met him a handful of times — always in spaces with moody lighting curated for unique musical experiences: BYTE’s creative coding performance, his collective HI8US’ Eden Express, and most recently, Anansi’s wrap-up celebration. I would describe him as reserved, witty, unapologetic, and extremely passionate & intentional about his craft.

He is multi-talented, introducing himself as a music producer, event curator, and DJ (which he insists I mention last: “unajua pia msee hutengeneza chapo ni dj?”). As a curator, he focuses on sound and aesthetic more than visual and prop: “Curation has always been something that I’m passionate about, and it helps me be a better artist. It’s one thing to make music and another to DJ, but you need the right setting to be able to do both.”

I sat down with him to talk about his artistry & identity, his collective HI8US & their upcoming event, the Jägermeister Save The Night fund, and everything in between.

How are you feeling?

I’m alright. I’ve been working on the project. It’s such a dope project, but it’s taking a lot of my time and my energy. I guess it’s a balance between good shit and bad shit. I’ve gotten a good amount of the good shit, which means engagement and positive feedback from the cohort and the crew, just making sure that there’s a balance between that and everything else is an everyday thing. You wake up every day, and there’s a new challenge. Yesterday I could have a good day, today I have a shit day. Next week I have a progressive day, then I have another day where it’s just the opposite of progress. It’s a roller coaster, to be honest, but the kind that is speaking volumes of a learning curve.

I can’t wait to get into that. But first, let’s start with the basics. Could you tell us about your musical journey? When did it start?

I started production in 2015 after hearing Kendrick’s To Pimp A Butterfly. It’s the most perfectly made album that’s not a Frank Ocean album, and it helped me grow as a person. I was still in high school then, so even though I had studied a bit of production, I couldn’t do it full-time. I took a year off after school and spent 2017 in every studio space I could get an invite to, and DJing started toward the end of that year. I released my first EP in early 2018 and would play a few shows: just bedroom parties, house parties, and even recording podcasts.

What drew you to art as a career choice?

I’ve always been very creative, it’s like breathing to me. My mom is an art teacher, so I grew up around a lot of art. I knew how to sketch and paint at a very young age, and that was my first interaction with art and expression.

With music, I have to date it back to To Pimp A Butterfly again, as well as Kaytranada’s 99.9%. I remember looking at the cover art, the theme, & even the website and thinking, “damn!” It was as visually appealing as it was sonically, & that’s when I understood that without good art, you can’t make good music. And that was the genesis.

Do you ever feel the need to control how people perceive you or separate yourself from your art? Is there a Rabudi the Artist & Rabudi the Person?

I’ve always wanted to try and separate those two because I’m a very private person. But a lot of my music is very melodramatic & melancholic, & it contains a lot of my personal stuff. I was making a track yesterday & included a voice note from my girlfriend & I paused for a bit & questioned if I still want to make music like that, especially now at a time when I have an increased amount of notoriety. I want my music to be truthful, but I also don’t want to be too introspective because the introspective me is the actual me. Guys who call me Mr. West know I’m a really solid footballer, or at least I like to think they do. Football is my main passion, just so you guys know. Now that there’s no football on TV, I’m a bit depressed because that’s what keeps me excited about life, to be honest. I would have easily been a footballer if I wasn’t an artist. You could say that Rabudi the individual is a football head 110 %. Liverpool is my club and Gor Mahia is my parent club. Then my music is just an expression of my emotions, especially intimate ones. That’s where I think that whole Lover Boy thing comes from… I think a lot of people used to make fun of me when I was still doing my residency in Kilimani. A lot of girls would come and try to pick me up because my music was very emotional, and my whole selection was a playlist that could speak that way: an emotional conversation with my following at the time.
It just created that space where people started knowing more about my personal life and I found it really weird at first.

There was also someone I really liked at the time who used to come over, & I think right away Id stop being Rabudi the artist & start being myself a bit more. So a lot of people got the chance to see me that way. I can’t say I enjoyed it because that was a time in my life when I just didn’t have any basis on what I was looking for in a partner. But it’s crazy how it affected my mood. It affected my work ethic, but mostly my music. One of my last projects, my second last project that’s now the only project I have on Spotify (The Infinite Playlist), is purely a breakup album if you really listen to it. It made me more of myself as an artist just as much as an individual. I stopped separating those characters. Rabudi Beng and Rabudi West are just the same person, to be honest. And it’s to my detriment sometimes because it burns me out to be myself all the time, but I prefer that to picking a persona to control perception. I decided to just let that be and see what comes of it. If I gravitate towards the right people, at least they’ll know who I am from the beginning rather than me containing multiple personalities that conflict one another. That’s just where I am with all that.

How the journey has been so far for you?

Well, the journey for me has been actually quite good, I can’t lie. I’ve had an unbelievable experience as an artist. It’s a classic story of blood, sweat, and tears, man. I’ve been through all kinds of emotions that come with being an artist, to begin with. I dropped out of school, well, not necessarily, but more like I took a deferral from uni. The first people to fight you on that are your parents, of course. Even before that, I think as soon as they realized how seriously I’m taking artistry, a fight began. It’s bittersweet. That’s why I can say there’s a lot of melancholic energy in my music. But I’m someone who will always look at the positive side. That’s why I’m like, honestly, I’ve had a really awesome trajectory. I can’t say that I have taken an eternity to grow. I have grown quite fast or maybe even too fast, in my opinion. Just being in high school and wanting to not be there because of all that creative energy I had. I had to just force myself to be in school while completely out of it mentally. It was until I went to uni that I started finding a balance between school and work.

That made my folks a bit more lenient, but still capable of sabotaging me, frustrating me, or killing my confidence. Because when you’re trying to be an artist and you’re being told about how scary the world is, you wouldn’t be able to pay rent, you get all those comments about how tough it is to be in this country. But at the same time, you face the same challenges working a regular 9-5. That leap of faith was something that took a lot of courage. I was homeless for a little bit. The classic “get out of my house by Thursday,” I left by Tuesday. I just needed that day to go figure my shit out, which I did. Then I remember spending three months just being a full-time artist. I enjoyed it, which was actually crazy because every single gig I did in that three-month period, I killed it, and it really helped me solidify my confidence personally and also just my name. But you don’t necessarily see your name growing until somebody else comes and talks to you. I can say the best part about my journey has mostly been how my music has carried me forward just as much as I’m a DJ.

If I was competing with other DJs, I wouldn’t have even been anywhere because it’s such a saturated market. But as a producer, I can say me putting in the time, putting in what? 8 years? And then going to Santuri in 2022 was me going back to school because I’d never gone to a production or DJing school. I just learned all these things from observation. I’m not really a YouTube guy, either. I just had the right people around me at the time. I pushed myself to get information and techniques and eventually licenses for some of these software and hardware. My first endorsement or collaboration with Native Instruments in early 2020 was huge. Native Instruments from Germany touched road with some of the guys I was working with. That was incredible because I started working with equipment and gear outside of my… I couldn’t afford a lot of this shit. Having an investor or a collaborator come in was a huge boost.

Transitioning into doing residencies and then never having a manager is one of those things I can say is tough about being a Kenyan artist. Even now, still managing myself, still making sure that whatever show I’m getting, whatever communication I’m having with a venue, with another artist, with a magazine like in your case, I still have to be the one to be on my toes, which can be overwhelming. But other creatives are now doing that same thing, like taking their art so seriously that they have to support themselves with it. It increases the work ethic. Then when there are enough of you in a group who are fully committed to what you’re doing, there is a bit more security in that. At the moment, I’m in a really nice network or tree of creatives, and we essentially support each other in every which way, even if it’s just dinner for a few nights, or crash at my crib, or borrow my equipment, or work at my office, or these small, small things amongst creatives that I’ve worked with over a long period of time has really given me longevity.

It’s been good. I can’t lie. Everything is so much in the present because I feel like the past four years have just flown by, to be honest.

Tell us about the Jägermeister Save The Night Campaign and your involvement. How has the experience shaped your artistic path and brought new dimensions to your role not only as a producer but also as an event organizer?

Working with the Jägermeister or being involved in that campaign wasn’t too much of a surprise for me because I knew how hard I had worked toward that and whatever intellect or network I had around such a concept was something I was quite sure of. The Save The Night fund is a fund that’s been issued by Jägermeister. Just like anything, you have to just present yourself and apply and give information about yourself, your community, and what you’re trying to do. I just got an email like, yeah, you’re the one; with two other winners from Berlin and from the UK. At the same time, wait, before that I even had… One thing I can celebrate is the Oroko Radio residency that I got. It’s also Berlin-based radio, but also London and Ghana, which is actually really cool. I’m an alumnus at Santuri and I finished in 2023. We had a sick showcase, one of the best shows I can say I’ve done, mostly because I transitioned into being an Ableton live performer rather than just being a DJ, which I think is a big deal for me because that’s how producers perform. That was a huge highlight.

By the time I was getting myself involved with Jägermeister, I guess I already had this track record between working with an NGO and a German-sponsored program, or German government and Oroko Radio just being a massive online community. A lot of their heads were also friends with the Jägermeister guys, so that helped. The Save the Night project started with me, Jägermeister, and HI8US; not just me, Rabudi, but HI8US: this concept that I started in early 2020. The campaign winners were announced towards the end of last year, & it’s been one hell of a learning curve because you come across real players in the game, and you realize how much, for some of them, it’s not really about creating and creatives; it’s just about how much money was spent, how much money is going to be spent, & PR. So fuck it if it was a shit event. As long as the PR works, that’s all they want to see. Suddenly I’m like a creative who’s being looked at as a success next to corporate or bodies and agencies who are looking at me like an item. It’s realizing, Oh, shit. As much as I’ve worked really hard to step up and be in a better space of working, you still come across that next level of like, now that you’re an artist and you’re commercial, and now your identity or your product or your idea is sellable, you have to be able to transact with it and let that carry you.

You’ve raised some really good points regarding the commodification of artists & creatives by corporations in the country, could you tell us abit more about that & any other hindrances you’ve faced during your time as a curator?

I think it should be said that there are a lot of gatekeepers, you know what I mean? They’re in the form of legal processes that we have to go through to be able to transact with international bodies. Because after the festival at the end of last year, a lot of local artists got a lot of attention from the international community, otherwise known as expats. Now it’s summer in Europe. So you can imagine how many people are traveling in and out of the country to be in clubs, to go to this to go to that. In the past, Kenya had always been seen as like a mahali pa wa nyama: you go for Safari, you see some cheetahs, and you’re in Kenya. But now it’s youth, it’s texture, it’s fabric, it’s aesthetic, it’s hairstyles, it’s sex. Right now, Kenya is like a metropolis of culture. I’ve just found myself super in the thick of it. Even with the money and the corporates, it’s like one big mix of potential and capabilities, but manipulation as well as capitalism.
It’s been tough for me to separate between opportunity, value exchange, people who bring in value just as much as they expect value, and learning about taxes and how to transact amongst people. You’d be surprised. Even banking and getting a passport and registering a company, it’s just been a huge learning curve. Maybe I might not be able to properly recap how it’s been until maybe a year from now and I’m just chilling and I can think about it. But for now, learning curve, you know what I mean? Both positive and negative. I think that’s the best way to put it.

Let’s talk about your collective, HI8US, and what you’ve been doing and plan to do in the future.

HI8US started off as an alternative stage at a small thrift festival. The festival itself had two stages and a thrift section. I took creative control of one of the stages and I named it HI8US. Because I had been conceptualizing around it kiasi, but things just aligned and I was able to just throw that name in there. It wasn’t really a collective at first. It was just a curative concept, you know what I mean? I was around a lot of Afro House, Tech House, Amapiano. It’s not that I don’t like these types of genres within electronic music, but they were not my thing. I couldn’t, I’d say, dance to it. I just didn’t feel like there was enough progress in terms of how people are presenting these genres.
But I still wanted to present my music. I just was an individual so mine was a curation. This is where HI8US really stemmed from. It’s like a curation that fits the alternative thing that’s going on at the time. At the time, it was in electronic music but was a bit too African-ish. Everyone wanted bongo drums, everyone wanted something that sound like a dead animal, like an animal just died. For me, I was just like, I want dance, different types of dance. That meant different types of beats, breakbeats, four by four beats, two by four beats, not just the tukutuku. I was like, okay, I want to set up a stage that accommodates pretty much anything other than that. Then from that, it developed into a residency that I was doing. I was handling a lot of logistics at the time. HI8US is mostly like a logistics entity. I don’t want to call it a company because you’d have to register and all that. Anything that’s super DIY, like you have a show and on the day of the show, that’s when everybody is like, Do you have an extra speaker? Do you have headphones? Do you have earphones? Do you have do you have?

It’s just constant curation, constant ideas, constant implementations of perspectives, and inputs. If I wanted a stage that was more informative of color and empathy, I would make something of that like concept. HI8US does a lot of conceptualization around curation and sound, of course, because, with logistics, it meant I helped pretty much any gig happen based on the equipment they already had and trying our best not to outsource for stuff; because the biggest expense can be renting stuff: renting equipment, renting cables, speakers.

I’ve always wanted to go for the classic rave feeling. For those who have been to enough raves, there’s so much about it that makes it a rave. When you show up, and you are at the parking and you just hear theboom, boom, boom, boom, the bass from a distance, that shit captures me. Then you can feel that excitement before the rave. You get in, you have to go through the bounce, of course, which is now racking.
Then you get past, and then you’re hit with the lights and the energy and the mixture of cigarette, smoke, and cologne and all the beautiful people who’ve come out to spend that night till the morning just dedicated to music. HI8US has always been a focus on music, a focus on rave culture, aesthetic, feeling, as I said, being able to be original, being able to be consistent, being able to be forward, and accommodating to collaboration.

So HI8US is more like a collaborative entity that facilitates people to be able to express themselves rather than just an event. But it’s just that when you have an event, then you can facilitate a space for people to do that. But our events are very specific with your… For example, for the Friday event, transport is being provided for specific ticket holders and for the crew, and some of these people we’ve been working with on the project with Jägermeister. This is just a small thing, but it’s super important just to make sure that any person who’s trying to get into the nightlife and the rave life can find a realistic landing to it so that we stop looking at nightlife like such an expense or such a risk to take. And as much as you’re buying a ticket for an event, there’s actual time and effort that was put into the making of this event. You don’t have to necessarily just show up and get blasted on alcohol for you to enjoy yourself. This is actually like music that’s been worked on and it’s been presented in a way where it was rehearsed and all these other elements around it were really thought about so that the execution can actually land.

Very few people will actually start to work something out to be able to help not just themselves, but others. I’ve been lucky to come across people who help others and continue to help others. At the moment, I’m just part of that ring. It’s not even like we are best friends or we are a collective, but there’s a bunch of really capable individuals and artists and communities and organizations that want to support artists. I just happen to be in the same room and conversation with all of them. HI8US is just a way to accommodate those people. Because as Rabudi, I’ve worked for these opportunities, but I’m just one person and I don’t even have all the skill sets. HI8US is just this space for more people to access opportunities that I as an individual have come across. Hopefully, Friday is just like an introduction. There are definitely a lot more things planned for between now and the end of the year. But Friday is the beginning of working collaboration with the creative community from Nairobi.