“This is the last lil offering from a very personal side of myself before I give y’all something big. Enjoy.”
That personal side houses remnants of D’Angelo, Prince, synths, and electronics mixed up into an R&B brew that’ll leave you starved for more. Ian Mugerwa is Dawuna and African Family Laptop Musick, released in July on True Panther, is his 4th record as such and since 2020’s smoldering brilliance Glass Lit Dream (you want to listen that one all the way through too).
For African Family Laptop Musick, I was healing from a traumatic head injury that gave me a later amnesia diagnosis, so I don’t remember more than a couple small flashes of memory from the recording/construction of this project. I know I wanted to make a low-fidelity concept piece about my family life at the time, compositionally simple, but necessarily abstracted.
I’m not so sure simple is a fitting word to describe these tasty wonders that unfold slow and steady, building up a rich head of steam.