The Story Behind Lamai

Lamai, alongside All At Once and Nyumbani, occupies a very particular place in my heart. They're songs that I genuinely love, but they arrived at an unfortunate moment in my life.

Between the release of the first and the third of those tracks, I lost both of my parents. Suddenly, music promotion became the last thing on my mind. It felt strange—almost impossible—to tell people to celebrate my work when I was carrying so much grief myself.

Because of that, I've always felt that Lamai and Nyumbani deserve more love than their numbers might suggest today. To me, they're bigger than streams and statistics. They're pieces of music that arrived during one of the darkest periods of my life, and perhaps because of that, they never got the attention I would have liked to give them.

But Lamai has its own story.

Originally, it was part of the Meniscus Reboot project, a collection of songs born from experimentation and heavily inspired by Daft Punk. Out of everything I've released so far, I think Lamai is the track where that influence is most obvious.

When I started making it, I had a very specific idea in mind.

I wanted to combine the unmistakable Daft Punk bassline style with vocoder-inspired vocals and layer them over African percussion. I was curious to see what would happen if those worlds collided. I also experimented with chants, hoping to give the song an energy that felt rooted in African rhythms and traditions while still living in the electronic world that inspired Meniscus Reboot.

The result was Lamai.

I also tried to incorporate the Orutu, an instrument that had already found its way into songs like Nilikupenda and the unreleased Mbele. In Lamai, however, its presence is much more subtle. It's there, but not as obvious as it is in some of my other work.

What I love most about Lamai is that, out of all the songs I've made so far, it might be the most danceable. More than any other track, it fulfills the original mission of Meniscus Reboot: to create music that makes people want to move.

That idea became especially important to me because Meniscus Reboot was born during my recovery from a meniscus injury. At a time when movement had been taken away from me, I found myself making songs that celebrated movement, rhythm, and energy. In a strange way, Lamai became a reminder of everything I missed and everything I hoped to return to.

The title itself has a much simpler origin.

Lamai is actually derived from the name of one of my relatives. I rearranged a few letters, liked how it sounded, and decided to use it. There wasn't some grand artistic reason behind it—I simply needed a name, and somehow Lamai felt right.

Sometimes, that's all it takes.

Looking back, Lamai feels like one of the purest expressions of what Meniscus Reboot was trying to accomplish: taking familiar influences, blending them with new ideas, and creating something that makes people want to get up and move.

So now I'm curious.

If you've listened to the songs from Meniscus Reboot, which one sounds the most inspired by Daft Punk to you?

Is it Journey? Sunset Drive? Neon Pulse? Or is it Lamai?

I'd love to know.

You can listen to the track here, or on Spotify.

If you'd like to support me directly, you can purchase Lamai on Bandcamp.