The three months between March and May 2020 were indisputably one of the most transformative periods of many of our lifetimes. Toward the end of March 2020, everything in the world seemed to halt because of the devastating coronavirus pandemic. Loved ones were lost. Job securities were lost. Personal relationships became more frayed. The safety of our collective and induvial wellbeing was lost.

Then on Memorial Day of that year, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. Witnessing the horror on film lit the fire of a ticking time bomb, fueled, in part, by pent-up frustration with the stay-at-home lockdown because of the pandemic, and the swelling resentment of the Black community, which kept witnessing numerous unarmed members of the community killed by the police without any accountability. Even prior to Floyd’s death, we were trying to recover from the senseless death of Breonna Taylor, who, in March 2020, was killed by Louisville, Kentucky police inside her home, and Ahmaud Abery, who, in February 2020, died at the hands of white vigilantes, because he was jogging in the predominately white neighborhood of Santilla Shores in Glynn County, Georgia. But after Floyd’s death, the world erupted in many Black Lives Matter-led protests. A simmering racial reckoning had exploded.

Within that timeframe – that crucible – came Black Rave Culture, a trio of Washington, D.C. maverick DJs and producers, who, within a two-year timeframe, has ascended to the forefront of underground forward-thinking electronic Black music worldwide thanks to such mesmerizing cuts as “Columbia Rd (Uptown)” “Africa 808,” and “Trip to London.”

Each member of Black Rave Culture – DJ Nativesun, Amal, and James Bangura — embody the spirit of what legendary London drum-n-bass producer Charlie Dark, once coined “Blacktronica,” the explicit acknowledgment, affirmation, and connecting the diasporic Black roots of electronic music to other genres, ranging from dub, reggae, jazz and disco to jungle, R&B, deep house, techno, garage, and any other hyphenated new-fangled genre that burbling on the streets. Blacktronica comes with the sharp edge of socio-culture protest in the face of the continued appropriation of Black culture and eventual erasure of Black people from influential genres. 

As Black Rave Culture prepare for shows in Miami, Los Angeles, and New York as well as finishing production on their forthcoming third release, BRC Volume 3, the three producers spoke with Beatportal inside Washington, D.C.’s posh hotel, Eaton. They talked about their origins; their individual paths to dance music; and why Black Rave Culture is so essential to the survival of 21st-century Black music.

Check out Black Rave Culture’s ‘Cover Story Chart’ on Beatport.

Explain how the trio came about.

James Bangura: Nativesun and I had known each other prior to that via Soundcloud. We’d shared music with each other. Nativesun also played a lot of my music on a Boiler Room gig in New York. That’s how we initially met, even though we were within the same musical circles on the internet. 

Amal and I met at the end of 2019. I’d seen him around D.C. at the club, Jimmy Valentine’s Lonely Hearts Club, which did a lot of dance music collectives shows. But I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t find out until later that he ran with the same group of people. We actually met at Public Records in New York City. And it was mainly because I recognized him. 

Amal and I initially started working on music via Splice. He moved back to Maryland from New York City to live with his parents. And I was here in D.C.  I realized his parents lived down the street from me. Then Nativesun started coming over to my house. We just started hanging out. There were no plans of making a group. It was just us hanging out, maybe pouring a glass or two of wine, and just sharing ideas and making music for fun. 

You all joined forces during the beginning of the pandemic. Talk about the effects the pandemic had on you all’s career at the time and on being creative in spite of it. 

Nativesun: The pandemic forced a lot of creatives to move differently and think differently – especially for me because I was DJing. A lot of money that I was making was through DJing. But I had always been talking about making time for production. So, the pandemic gave me that space and time to free up my DJing stuff to really start production, which put me aligned with these two dudes. 

I got hip to dudes who were producing tracks for a compilation on an all-Black record label in New York called Haus of Altr.  The compilation basically showcased Black artists within the electronic music scene. So, I was part of that as well as James and Amal. We all noticed that we were all on it together, but we submitted individual tracks. 

For the second compilation, we all submitted individual tracks. Then the third compilation came about we said, “Hey, we’re all from D.C. Why not represent D.C., come together, and make a track?” 

We met at Amal’s crib, and we all worked on a track. What blew my mind was how quickly we made that track and how well we all meshed together. We were all on the same page. There were no egos. There were no weird feelings. We just respected each other’s individual styles and the way each of us worked. 

Talk about collaborating on that one track for the compilation.

Amal: To be completely honest, it was super last minute. We knocked it out the night before it was due. I had chopped up an old XIB go-go song, “Whooh Lawd.” 

Then Nativesun came over, and we turned into more of a club song. I wasn’t really 100 percent sure of how it was going to be received. It got picked up for us do an interview about it. And I think that’s when we started seeing what we really had. 

Nativesun: A lot of our music comes out from a sense of having fun. A lot of our first BRC songs were joke tracks. But people loved them. The way we go about production is like musical chairs. We all have our own strengths. But it’s like we are putting together puzzle pieces. We will sit down, and someone would start something and when they feel like that get to a stopping point, they’ll say, “OK, who wants to jump on?”

Who came up with the name Black Rave Culture?

Amal: Technically, it was a track that Nativesun and I were working on. I think it was the second track that Tim and I collaborated on. When we were building a bulk of music and we had to think about the name of the project, I was like,  “Why not call it Black Rave Culture.” The name had more meaning to it as we grew as a group.

The pandemic really gave us a chance to come together. Creatively, I’m grateful for it because it really slowed me down and taught me a lot of things in terms of production skills. I learned that it was as important for me to allocate enough time to developing my production skills as it was developing my DJing skills. The pandemic taught me a few life lessons – musically.  I took a lot of hits financially from not DJing, but it has opened up a new door just working with these dudes. It closed one door and opened up another one.

Bangura: We needed each other. I needed those guys because there were a lot of things that I was going through at that time. I was in the U.S. army. A lot of things that were going on at the beginning of 2020 and down to the George Floyd incident made me reassess what my relationship was with the military and my identity as a Black man coming out of that and coming back into civilian life. I realized that I wasn’t a soldier anymore; I’m another Black man out on the streets. The fact that I’m a military veteran didn’t matter. I easily could have been George Floyd. 

I had to cut off a lot of ties that I had in the military because of what was going on with Black people in America. That was like a death in almost an iconoclastic way. Losing a friendship is almost like that. But I gained friends, including – Amal and Nativesun. And that’s what I needed because, coming out of the military, I’m still navigating how to be a regular person and just exist. 

Amal: The pandemic really opened up the world of dance music to me as a young Black artist. I wasn’t that involved with dance music before the pandemic. But I came out of the pandemic with a career in dance music. It was a very interesting time for people to ponder about who they are and to learn new things about themselves.

So, what music were you involved with prior to 2020?

Amal: I come from the worlds of hip-hop and rap. I was a music engineer; I also played in a bunch of punk bands. I was mostly DJing for rappers. I was doing house parties and college shows. I went to Howard University before I dropped out. I really got my chops from DJing at Howard, where I would play whatever diasporic Black dance music, whether it be rap, twerk music, or house.

Nativesun: I move around a lot with my DJ career. Growing up in the D.C. and Maryland area, my dad was a DJ. I grew up playing in go-go bands. I got into DJing a little before college. I did a lot of parties around D.C. then I started playing a lot in New York and on the West Coast. I played in London and at a lot of other places overseas. I had a residency at Velvet Lounge. I played in a go-go band called Indecent Exposure.

Bangura: I didn’t really get into DJing and dance music heavily until 2003. I was living in Newark, New Jersey, at the time. That’s when I got into Jersey club music. We used to go to Branch Brook Park, which had a skating rink. Kids would dance inside the skating rink. I actually moved from Fort Payne Alabama to Newark to live with my mom. That opened me up to a whole different world. After living there for a year and a half, I moved back to Alabama to live with my grandmother for a little bit. Then I got into hard techno music and the rave scene. I was about 16 or 17 years old at the time. A lot of people don’t realize that the southeast [in the U.S.] has a real healthy rave community. 

There was a forum on the internet – Glowsticking.com. I got into that heavily because I was a dancer. Around 2004, I moved to California. I lived in Riverside. The population is mainly Mexican. So, I got a chance to experience a lot of Mexican DJs. Around 2006 or 2007, that’s when the whole Bloghouse thing started happening. And a lot of early European DJs started coming over. I promoted parties until 2010. That’s when I joined the military. 

I was into breakdancing. My mom was a dancer and my uncle was a dancer. My mom put me in tap dancing when I was three. So, I come from the dance realm. I had no intentions of becoming a DJ. A lot of my inspirations come from my dancing background. When I’m making music, I’m thinking about dancing and how my body is going to respond to it.

Thanks to Beyonce’s new album, Renaissance and Drake’s new album, Honestly, Nevermind, mainstream culture is reacquainting itself with deep house music. But it never really left Washington, D.C. Still, the gentrification of the city has impacted it dramatically in the last two decades. It was once called Chocolate City not just because of its majority Black population but the agency in which Black people held on a political, social, cultural and economic level. What effects have you seen gentrification on the current club scene in D.C.?  

Nativesun: There were a lot of scenes in the late-’90s that were funkier. But the generation that I was coming up within were going to different parties at different venues. I was going to places like Flash that had a certain kind of crowd and vibe. I was always sitting there thinking, “Why we ain’t in here?” The crowd was predominately white. I kept thinking, “Why aren’t we in some of these bigger clubs or so-called cool clubs?

I was listening to the music that these cats were spinning and see these super EDM cats playing Baltimore club music or Jersey club music. And I was like, “Wait a minute. The cats that make this music are Black. Why aren’t they on these stages?” It just started to ring a bell to me through traveling and seeing the same thing in other cities. 

For many of the club owners and event producers, it was more about selling tickets, getting the big numbers, and wanting to keep their crowds a certain way. Some club owners would tell me, “Oh, we don’t want to play that type of music on the weekends. We want a certain style.” 

Bangura: It really is that idea of marketability and accessibility. This has been happening all over the United States. A lot of these venues, especially in California, are charging people between $60 and $80 to go to a nightclub. I remember in 2004, I was paying $80 to go to a three-day festival. You have to be naïve to not know that for these platforms, they don’t feel like Black artists are marketable. It’s very evident. If you do a side-by-side comparison of marketing for a lot of these club owners and concert producers, they want a certain aesthetic. And it’s always a visual aesthetic. But the music never hits the bar that it needs to. 

Every time we’ve played in spaces that were predominately white, the owners are shocked, because they didn’t expect that many people to attend, or they never heard any Black DJ play music like that. Well, the fact of the matter is that they were usually bringing in artists that weren’t hitting that high level of music quality. The artists that they were usually bringing in were hitting two things – marketability and the fact that people are going to pay a premium to see themselves in front of them. And that springs another conversation about what people want out of a dance music experience. Do they want to listen to music? Or do they want it as background noise and be around so-called beautiful people?

Amal: Right now, we are in a time where everything seems to be aesthetically driven – it’s more about how it looks than how it sounds.  I think they use Black talent as a picture board and try to insert Black aesthetics without any feeling or direction in these spaces where people mimic what we do where they feel space. That’s a big problem in D.C. because it doesn’t give a lot of Black talent any visibility for younger people coming up. There are a bunch of kids who are younger than me who want to know about drum-n-bass. There are a bunch of Black kids making music around D.C. and Maryland and they don’t get to play at any shows. They’re not getting their songs played at Fabric or on these huge playlists. 

Growing up, I didn’t know if was even safe for me to explore electronic music or make it myself. I didn’t even know if that was a place for me until I saw Nativesun DJ. When I saw him, I was 16. He introduced me to footwork and drum-n-bass. I used to call it Adult Swim music because that was the only time I would hear it. The first time I played at a proper rave, it was with Nativesun. That goes to show you how little we have regarding that. 

But mainstream Black culture can also be confining, especially if it veers away from hip-hop. Talk about the struggles of navigating the mainstream Black nightlife scene.

Nativesun: In D.C., I’m in an interesting space. One minute I could be doing Black Rave Culture shit, and the next minute I could have a residency at one of the Top 40 clubs. It was always a struggle. I had a residency at Velvet Lounge on Saturday night. You’d get everybody walking into that joint. For me, it was like, “How can I make these motherfuckers love dance music in that way that I love it?” I had to mix it in with the regular Top 40 shit but in a special way at a certain time of the night. 

DJ Underdog and I would do that with footwork. Footwork was not popular in D.C. like that, because it’s really fast; it’s like 160 BPM. We would play that shit at a party we called, OkayAfrica, where we played African music. We had to get people up to that point where we could sneak that shit in, where they trusted us. It was an uphill battle. 

I would play house music, and my own brothers and sisters would look at me and say, “What’s this shit you’re playing? Play something that we can dance to?” I’m like, “If you listen to it, you’d be able to dance to it because house music has the same rhythm as your heartbeat.” 

Bangura: The beautiful thing about this is you that can’t really avoid that. Even within our own spaces, there will be a point of education. And it’s also about relationships. It’s about the trust built between the DJs and the crowd. It’s about slowly feeding them this music instead of just throwing it at them. 

Growing up and listening to dance music at an early age, I was always the super nerdy kid. I was listening to jungle music. One of my first jungle CDs was a sampler from URB magazine; it was DJ Craze. That was in 2001. I was the only black kid in our crowd listening to jungle. I was listening to hardstyle, trance. We are making sure that folks understand that Black people aren’t a monolith.

Amal: We are reclaiming our space in electronic music in the present tense. It’s more of a mission for me right now to show people that this is the new generation of kids who know what’s going on. We are educating our peers. So, you’re either on this train, or you’re not. There’s more room for us to now only reclaim but reallocate resources to take fuller control of what we’ve made. Besides the big music industry that we have to tussle with, we have the power right now. We need to shift the narrative because we are the narrative.

Black Artist Database is a community-based entity, centred around their artists’ database, which hosts a wealth of Black-owned record labels, artists, producers and bands. In addition to the database, B.A.D. undertakes various projects and initiatives to uplift Black voices within the electronic music community & industry. Black Artist Database also recently launched a Creative Database hosting an even broader range of Black creative professionals across various disciplines. Find them on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

John Murph is a Washington, D.C.-based music journalist who has written for TIDAL, NPR Music, Washington Post, JazzTimes, Down Beat, and The Atlantic. He’s also a DJ. Find him on Twitter.