Mixtape/Interview: Mo Kolours

Mo Kolours alias Joseph Deenmamode is a London-based musician with an ear tuned to every corner of the globe. Mixing eccentric hip hop à la Gonjasufi with King Sunny Ade’s strangely psychedelic, drum-led juju and the Sega music of his father’s native Mauritius, Joseph’s recent ‘EP1: Drum Talking’ is an unassumingly great sonic gumbo; a veritable lesson in how to say plenty with a minimum of musical information.

Anyway, Mo has been kind enough to supply The Stool Pigeon with an exclusive mix, ‘Bluesblood’, for the website, and speak to us about the origins of his singular style.

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It wasn’t like a massively conscious effort, it was more that I wanted to incorporate my influences into the music, and that was one of them.

Did you record principally electronic music when you were starting out or was there a lot of live instrumentation in there too?

I started out really inspired by hip hop instrumentals, I just thought it would be interesting to try and sample stuff and make beats. The percussion and hard drums element is something I’ve always been interested in, but it started off more electronic and became more live as I went along.

Are you much of a drummer yourself? How would you rate your skills?

Not very good! I just mess around really, luckily [UK hip hop whiz] Paul White asked me to come and drum with him trying to replicate his live show. And that’s led me into drumming a bit more, whereas before I was just hitting stuff and recording it. But I don’t consider myself a drummer really.

Would you like to work with some?

I don’t see why not, I’d love to work with more people generally. Maybe not with the Mo Kolours, this seems more of a solo project. But in the future who knows what could happen? I’ve been meeting up with a few percussionists and talking about making some recordings, so yeah…

Does Sega music traditionally have some form of use in Mauritius?

I think there was a slightly religious, spiritual element to it in the beginning. It was people trying to connect with their ancestors on the mainland, they’d been enslaved on this little island in the Indian Ocean, and it was also a way to remember home and gather as a community. Then it became more of a celebratory dance and music, something to make people feel happy. So it’s evolved quite a lot.

Can you hear a lot of African music in it?

Oh yeah, personally I think it’s very African. Not so much with the more modern stuff — if you were to YouTube or Google it you might find a lot of electronic, reggae-influenced Sega that’s going around but the old stuff is very African-orientated.

How did the reggae influence enter the equation with modern Sega?

There was this guy in the ’90s, this Creole Mauritian who was very fond of Bob Marley and reggae, and he fused the two and called it seggae. Reggae seems to really take off in Mauritius, I guess it’s the island culture. So now I presume young Mauritian artists wouldn’t be differentiating between the two so much.

You’ve mentioned in previous interviews that sega is laid on for the tourists a lot nowadays, but do young people still play the music to and for each other?

Yeah, they do. I think you’d be hard-pressed as a tourist going out there to actually find that, but I’ve seen people messing around on the beach, just getting drunk and stuff as the sun’s going down and playing the music. It’s still part of Creole culture, part of Mauritian culture and the old guard of the Creole still do that. What is good about the tourist element of sega is at least it’s keeping the music going. ‘Cos otherwise it might have just faded away, but because it’s become part of the national identity it’s being pushed to the front, just like anything they can cling to as being uniquely Mauritian. So it’s good and bad.

Have you played your own music to people over there?

I haven’t but my dad’s Mauritian, he’s heard it and he knows what it’s like…

I read that he turned you on to the music in the first place, right?

Yeah. He says it sounds like me, so I don’t know what that means. But I think he can feel the Sega in there, and I’ve had some kind comments from fellow Mauritians in Britain and from around the world saying they appreciate the influence. So I don’t think I’ve upset any Mauritians yet.

Other than the fact it’s part of your roots, what excites you about Sega music?

I think it’s a freeness… essentially it’s an improvised thing, there were no set songs in Sega for a long time, maybe ‘til the ’70s. And then you had this guy Ti Frere, who would put the same lyrics every time over this music and they became songs rather than just people improvising lyrics. But essentially it does remain an improvised thing, and I like to express the moment. That’s what my music is trying to achieve. I like the rawness of it — often the musicians aren’t trained and they just go for it, so I like that attitude as well. It just fits well with what I’m about. But it’s the same with lots of indigenous music from all sorts of places round the world.

What other stuff has been inspirational for you musically-speaking? You mentioned hip hop as an early influence?

There are so many… as a kid I was just massively into hip hop; A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul, then later on Slum Village and Jay Dee. It just really inspired me, it’s got that heartfelt rawness, again. It’s more of a feeling that gets me in all types of music. But reggae’s a big thing for me, personally I just find there’s so much old music to find. That’s a massive thing for me, finding these old artists who maybe weren’t brought to the fore. I just get little obsessions. Not long ago I was really into Brazilian music, then tracing that back to Angola and Mozambique; this game of tennis that Brazilian music has played with Angola over the years. Just little things like that I suppose.

What have you been listening to most recently?

Everything I’m listening to filters into what I make. But at the moment I’m trying to find out about a lot of roots reggae I’ve missed out on. One person I’m really into right now is a track on the mix, Alton Ellis. He’s a vocalist and that’s one thing I’m thinking about a lot more at the moment, the way people handle themselves on a track vocally. Just because for me it was always abut rhythm and drums and everything else apart from that, but recently I’ve started to experiment. Again he just has the true, raw feeling — it feels like he’s talking to you directly, and he talks about stuff that’s really still relevant.

Are you able to get near feeling as a vocalist yourself yet?

It’s early stages, I’ve been a bit wary about it. It’s a massive step to actually say things with your songs, I’d like to be able to say stuff that means something but I don’t know if I’ve done that yet! It’s more about the way you come across than the lyrics I think, you can say a lot with a small amount word-wise, just with the way you manipulate things melodically.

You mentioned Ti Frere’s influence on sega music’s development, what kind of stuff would he sing about?

He just sang about everyday life and Mauritian culture. Just the Creole people trying to get on with their lives. He was a bit rude really. A lot of Creoles were a bit uppity — it’s quite a conservative country in many ways. It’s got that old British mentality going on, from colonialism really. So a lot of people didn’t like sega, they didn’t like the Africanism of the Creole culture. So Ti Frere was really brash and said a lot of rude things. He talked about people in a bad way, about women and getting drunk. I think he was just being quite real about Mauritian life at the time. ‘Cos there was this whole British mentality which was kind of about hiding from the truth.

A fine old legacy.

Yeah, isn’t it?

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