The air was electric at the event known as Amps and Ramps, and the sounds of skating could be heard from as far away as outside the gates to Shangilia SkatePark. Cheering and yells of excitement reverberated from in and out of the bowl,underscored by the scrape of wheels against concrete and thunderous guitar riffs. As people arrived at the park, greetings joined the air of celebration, with returning members of the community making the rounds of meeting old and new friends alike. Every once in a while, a yell of elation would erupt as someone landed a new trick they had been working on for the day, adding an infectious sense of pride that today was a smash hit throughout. 

Skateboarding in Nairobi is something that has been written about by everyone from CNN to Red Bull (yes, the energy drink). However, not much has been written about the sounds that come from the regular spots like the Shangilia Skatepark and the Westlands Mall contribute to create a scene that is constantly growing and evolving to meet the needs of Nairobi’s youth. Since arriving in Nairobi, I have been able to make friends with skaters here in Nairobi and hear about all this exciting development myself, as well as witness it firsthand. 

I first heard of the skateboarding scene in Nairobi through my professor Wangui Kimari when she brought in a chairman of the Skateboarding Society of Kenya, George, as a guest lecturer. After some conversations with him and other skaters that he introduced me to, I was able to learn a great deal about how sound plays a role in skating. The Skateboarding Society of Kenya has established itself as a place to connect youth of Nairobi together on a common ground, building a community of skate culture from the ground up to provide alternate pathways towards livelihood. To further expand my knowledge of the scene, I also got into contact with Antoinette, co-founder of GirlskateNairobi, to learn about how a male-dominated activity is shifting to become more equitable in practice and formation. GirlSkateNairobi is a community of young Kenyan women who skateboard, and help with the overall mission to connect, represent, and empower through the act and joy of skateboarding, using both in person events and social media to reach the masses. Through both of these discussions as well as urban observation, I have been able to better document the intersection between sound and skateboarding. 

Both George and Antoinette, when asked about how skating and sound connect, talked about how the sound itself of skateboarding is like a call to other skaters to see who is out on the streets or at the park. Because the sound of a skateboard is so distinct in contrast to the other noises of the numerous cars, matatus, and boda bodas, it sticks out and calls to other skaters to see who it is. If it’s someone they know, then it is a reunion of friends talking about tricks or plans. If it is someone they haven’t met before, then it is a new member of the skateboarding scene. It creates this coalition between expression, support, and sound. 

This coalition increases with size as music becomes involved. On April 13th, both the Skateboarding Society of Kenya and GirlSkate Nairobi worked together to host an event to coincide with the reopening of Shangilia Skatepark. The event, Amps and Ramps, was an all day event that hosted skating competitions and live music from local artists within Nairobi. The event was a major success in drumming up support for skateboarding in Nairobi, with one skater saying that more people showed up than expected by a wide margin, from families with children to young people wanting to learn how to skate. Simultaneously, people who showed up got to see skaters show off their best tricks while listening to local rock bands. Some of these bands included Nairobi rock, punk, and metal mainstays like Crystal Axis and Chovu, continuing the perception that rock and skating are connected. As bands played, skaters would speed up and down the ramps, flipping boards and grinding rails. The area in front of the bands was teeming with those moving from end to end on their boards. 

Music continues to build the coalition because it is another angle where skaters can distinguish themselves. George told me about how skaters often associate their styles of skating with distinct genres of music. If a skater, says George, has a more relaxed style of skating, they usually gravitate towards a more relaxed genre of music like hip hop to distinguish themselves in social media posts and skate videos. Music is a large part of skate culture in Nairobi, and music could be heard at Shangilia Skatepark blaring from someone’s phone while others skated. People would share earbuds with one another while they were doing tricks as well, looking to share in added revelry with music while practicing. Skateboarding is a heavily individualized practice, with it revolving around how skaters decide to test out tricks that they see. From this, a style that is more based on the individual rather than what is seen as “correct” is born, backed up by a differing sound from the skating itself, depending on speed or accessories that are attached to the board (such as different wheels or bearings), as well as the music that is associated with it. 

Skateboarding as a whole is an activity that generates a lot of sound, and that adds to the mystique of it all. Two of the people interviewed (George and fellow skater Felix) talked about how they were inspired by Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, a video game series where you earn points for doing the best tricks in a certain amount of time. The noises (such as those that occur when you successfully land tricks) from the game have both been inspired by skating and inspired events outside of the game. At Amps and Ramps, competitions were done by seeing who could mimic or outperform the other in terms of tricks. The loser of each round of tricks earns a letter of the word SKATE, and the first one to spell out this word loses the competition. This is in reference to Tony Hawk, as the word SKATE would be possible to collect across its five letters in a level, with the collection of each letter giving off a noise (here). This goes along with how music is intertwined with skating as well, with music being played over these competitions at Amps and Ramps to get the crowd more excited. The yells of excitement over a skater landing a trick and gaining the upper hand in a game of SKATE fills the entire park with energy, and bounces off the walls, encouraging other skaters to try the tricks themselves.

Sound and skating seem to bring with it a loud pride that reverberates out from the skatepark and across the city. From cheering as people congratulate each other on their tricks to the humming and singing along to music that reflects on their style, there is much to be said about how sound plays off of skating. The pride of being a skater is not a quiet one, rather it is the loud rumbling of the wheels against concrete and dirt path alike, along rails and stairs and the curve of the bowl, it is the excitement that skaters show when they hear this noise that shows that the sounds pull them together into a coalition. No matter what their background is, they will always have skating, and the community that has been created around it.

Larson Bukowski is an undergraduate student at American University in Washington D.C. studying international studies and the Arabic language. His studies as a student while in Nairobi focused on the rock, punk, and metal scene, as well as skateboarding and youth movements in general. He hopes to expand these studies in his last semester of his undergraduate degree. 

GirlSkateNairobi can be found on Instagram and TikTok as @girlskate_nairobi
The Skateboarding Society of Kenya can be found on Instagram as @skateboarding_society_of_kenya

It’s been a relatively “quiet” year from the SON team, but that has mostly been due to the whirlwinds of personal projects and commitments that have been the common theme of everyone’s 2023 thus far. Still, we’ve managed to finish and are about to present the tidings from our main endeavour of the past 12 months or so, the recordings and testimonies from the election campaign period of 2022, or Sound Pressure Levels as we called it, coming soon to the archive and this blog.

It has not been all silent however – there was the Sound Art exhibition that we helped organize and that took place on March 10th – 19th at The Mall, Westlands, featuring SON’s own Sophia Bauer alongside the artists Kevo Stero, KMRU and Manjahi Njoroge. In this piece, Sophia looks back at the experience of finally realizing a long-held idea, restating the team’s desire to explore and develop the learning and practice of art and knowledge-building using the medium of sound.

SOPHIA REFLECTS ON THE MARCH 2023 SOUND ART EXHIBITION

I had been thinking about an exhibition of sound art in Nairobi for a few years. Firstly I wanted to show my installation Forest Scapes in Nairobi and secondly I wanted to show it along with other works from Nairobian artists, to shine a light onto this emerging scene. As early as 2019 I started reaching out to fellow artists to ask if they would be interested, and already then The Mall seemed a perfect place for that – I had noticed a few unused spaces that struck me as perfect locations for sound-based works as they would not interfere with each other, being in different rooms, yet could be experienced together in one space – just what we needed. And so I started conversations with the management of The Mall. But then Covid-19 happened and for the next two or three years my focus and that of the world shifted. The idea remained in my head though.

In 2023, at last, I managed to get some funding to bring the installation to Nairobi, from the German organization IFA – Institut Für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), a possibly worthwhile link for readers/artists who may want to exhibit in Germany or collaborate with German artists. Luckily, fellow artists Kevo Stero and KMRU, with whom I’d spoken all those years ago, where still on board and were to be joined by Manjahi Njoroge. I reached out again to the management of The Mall and was happy to find that the spaces I had seen earlier were still available.

The four spaces were easily apportioned: Kevo Stero’s installation Obange inhabited a former liquor store on the ground floor of the building. In this work he explores the character of the Obange, a joker, clown, crazy person in the community, and asks: in certain situations, might anyone of us be not be the Obange? He uses the medium of radio to discuss this character, taking a mobile recording studio and micro-broadcast station to different parts of the city in search of so many Obanges-among-us. In his installation you could hear the different voices from past recordings/broadcasts as well as tune in to the ongoing live radio show – the signal could be received anywhere in the station’s vicinity.

What struck me on my first trip to Nairobi was the sudden silence when night fell. As if a switch had been flipped, all of a sudden it goes dark and the noisy hustle and bustle of life abruptly falls silent. In my home city Berlin, especially in the summer, the sunset stretches on for hours. People sit not only in cafes and restaurants, but fill public spaces, parks and street corners, talking, drinking, making and listening to music.
One evening in Berlin, I met the Nairobian artist Sam Hopkins. Our mutual friend, artist Alex Nikolic, introduced us. 
The two were planning “It’s a pity we only exist in the future” (1), an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi. That was in 2009. Although I had been around as an electronic musician and DJ, the African continent was unknown to me. I decided to travel to this exhibition opening and offered myself as a DJ. The Goethe-Institut agreed and supported my flight ticket.

On that trip I got to know the hip hop collective Ukoo Flani, Just a Band, the artist group Maasai Mbili and numerous artists, MCs and musicians. I knew nothing about the music and its scene in Kenya; conversely, the local musicians were unfamiliar with Berlin’s electronic music and the club culture. We got excited and became curious to hear what kind of music these different backgrounds and experiences could produce together. This trip was the starting point for BLNRB (Berlin – Nairobi), the first international music project that my brother Hannes and I co-initiated with the Goethe-Institut.
We invited musicians from both cities to make music together, to give concerts and to make recordings. BLNRB also showed us on many levels how music, social context and its possibilities are interconnected. 
Some examples: To try out how that collaboration could sound like, a local studio was rented for two days. We packed a bunch of drum machines and synths and got excited to jam, just to find ourselves stuck in the daily traffic jams in Nairobi. When we arrived at the studio, we were already exhausted.
The high hourly costs of the recording studio then limited our possibilities to make music. Under the pressure of a ticking clock, it was impossible to get deeper into a musical process together. 

We quickly realized that a local recording studio was hardly suitable to create a viable working framework. So for the main part of the project, we decided to rent a house. We found a place in Westlands and set up a temporary studio and living space for the musicians involved. Living and working together over three weeks was a productive challenge. It made the differences in the ideas and needs of daily togetherness apparent. All participants had to confront themselves and ask themselves what they took for granted. The outcome, the collective album with its music and the title “Welcome To The Madhouse” is a reflection on this experiences. It was then released on Out|here Records (2).

We organized an opening concert at the Goethe-Institut. A main aspect was to allow open access for everyone interested. Therefore, admission was free. For an audience from districts such as Kibera or Mathare, it was nevertheless almost impossible to come to the event. The journey home could be organized for participating artists from Kibera, but an audience was thereby excluded. Despite our inclusive intentions we had created an exclusionary space. 

Later on we were able to organize a joint open air concert in Kibera together with the Maasai Mbili Art Center (3). We could use the bus of the Goethe-Institut and bring their soundsystem with us. Musicians of the BLNRB project played and we opened the microphones for spontaneous contributions. 
Robo and Little King, two 12 year old kids, impressed us so much that we invited them to the studio the next day. The party in Kibera for me is one of the best memories of the BLNRB project.
I realized that mobility is a privilege that also shapes the possibilities and circumstances under which music can be produced and experienced. This became even more apparent when it came to organizing a return match in Berlin: While the Berlin artists could get the visa for Kenya “on arrival” at the Nairobi airport, the visa process for the Kenyan artists to enter Germany was complicated. Without institutional support it would have been impossible to get visas for the Kenyan participants and also the financing of such undertakings would hardly have been possible


BLNRB has motivated us to initiate similar projects in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Mexico, among others, in which the initial experiences of BLNRB are always incorporated. 
But it has also motivated me to look more intensively at the connections between social spaces and power structures, and at the way they affect making music together and the music itself. 
In a late interview, composer John Cage talks about street noises outside his window on 6th Avenue in New York. He likes to listen to the traffic because it doesn’t want to tell him anything about relationships, ideas or feelings and adds: “If you listen to Beethoven or Mozart it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic it’s always different” (4).
Traffic does not say so much about the ideas and feelings of an individual composer, but I believe that the sounds of the city, whether loud or silent, say a very lot about relationships.
The French sociologist and political scientist Henri Lefebvre observes, describes and analyzes the rhythms of urban spaces as organisms and movements of bodies, groups, classes and social structures (5).
These structures are reflected in the sounds of a city, but you can also hear them in music.
I understand music as a product and an exploration of these boundaries. This is reflected in the individual ways of making music, in the way of playing together, of performing, experiencing, but also of distributing and the accessibility of recorded music. The context is always part of the music. That‘s why I also don’t think Beethoven and Mozart sound always the same: Who makes or has the possibilities to make music, where, how with whom, for me are part of music. What we hear, what we don’t hear, reflects social interaction and power structures embedded in the sound; it marks accesses, exclusions, and ways to deal with them. What we listen to shows exactly that. But what we hear on the other hand shows a lot about ourselves and our conditioning of the ways we are listening.
Thus my impression of Nairobi described at the beginning of the text did not represent the whole city at all, but the center around Chester House/ Koinange Street, where I lived. 
But it shaped my thoughts about Nairobi’s differences to Berlin at first.
In contrast, Kibera was very lively after sunset. But I didn’t notice that until later. I was privileged to be able to move around.





(1) http://www.samhopkins.org/its-a-pity-we-only-exist-in-the-future.html
(2) https://outhererecords.bandcamp.com/album/blnrb-welcome-to-the-madhouse
(3) https://www.instagram.com/maasai_mbili/?hl=de
(4) Sebestik, Miroslav (Regie), Grange Anne, Sebestik Miroslav (Buch): Écoute, Paris, 1992, Centre Georges Pompidou, JBA Production, La Sept, Mikros Image, Sacem
(5) Lefebvre Henri: Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, Paris, Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2019, S. 51, Original Édition Syllepse, Paris, 1992

Andi Teichmann (*1975, München) is an electronic musician, DJ. With his brother Hannes he forms the duo Gebrüder Teichmann, who together initiate music related projects and collaborations and run the music label NOLAND. Rooted in Berlin‘s underground and DIY-culture since the late nineties, they are driven by a vibrant curiosity and love for music and sound and its social relations. They collaborated with artists across a variety of genres and traditions in more than 60 countries as far as Afghanistan, Siberia or Angola. In 2022 Andi finished his master thesis at Art in Context, UDK Berlin.