Today, Los Angeles-based DJ and producer DJ Karaba shared her brand new EP, Délivrance, a collection of five fiercely percussive and personal tracks that pack an empowering punch. Having started her career dancing with some of pop music’s heaviest hitters such as Drake, Camilla Cabello, and Selena Gomez, the release today showcases Karaba’s renewed artistic purpose as a music maker. “I’m very intense and it’s reflected in everything I do, especially music,” Karaba says enthusiastically. “My goal being on this earth is to inspire people, especially young black girls, that you can literally do whatever you put your mind into. I’ve come from barely anything, but I have an artistic soul that guided me to where I am today.”
Listen/Share: Délivrance EP
Music and (literal) movement have defined Karaba’s entire life. Born in France to a Congolese father and a French-Italian mother, Karaba is able to pull from her foundations of a life defined by pop music, Afro House, Afro Beats, Amapiano, and the ways in which a body can move to those sounds to create today’s kinetic set of defiantly club-ready tracks. Her attentiveness to using the rich sounds from African countries comes from one her first few times DJing. While spinning a house track, Karaba uncovered all the ways in which music from Africa was being incorporated into these works. “The more research I did, the more I saw that there were DJs playing music from my country, and this is where everything changed for me. I discovered music from the whole continent of Africa and knew I found my niche, my purpose as a musician: To share with people the music from my own people, my own country,” she says.
Karaba hopes that, with such dedication to learning about and incorporating music from countries in Africa, her audience will be more curious about the variety and depth of music from all over the continent. “Now, everything is kind of served on a plate, and it’s really your job, as a music listener, to do more research and know what style comes from which country,” she says, “A lot of the sound that is coming to the Western world is very much influenced by Africa, and so the artists behind it are deserving of a space to be seen and heard.”
Karaba’s music is electric and fiery. There is no moment of pause or slow down. Her intensity, her wish to see people dance and feel the music the way she feels it, is aspirational, all-consuming. There is unmitigated joy to such devotion to sound, and in being enveloped by one’s passion. Nearly two years into making music full-time, Karaba says Délivrance is one of the most personally fulfilling things she has ever done.
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