A spoon and towel hooks: Kenya's DIY DJ

27-year-old Paul Mwangi makes tunes from trash

NAIROBI:

A spoon, some towel hooks, a piece of kettle and a plastic cap - that's all you'll need to make a mixing deck if you have the technical and musical skills of DJ Boboss.

The 27-year-old - real name Paul Mwangi - has been building up a fanbase online and on the streets of Kenya with the one-of-a-kind deck that he put together himself.

It has even earned him slots at Uganda's Nyege Nyege festival, the largest in east Africa, and on the world-renowned club website Boiler Room.

But his favourite venue is Nairobi's bustling business district, where he set up on a recent Saturday among the stands of miraa (khat) vendors, the smell of grilled corn and the horns of matatus, the colourful minibuses of the Kenyan capital.

In a few minutes, dozens of curious onlookers had gathered, taking out their phones to film the amazing machine that spits out reggae hits. The mixing desk consists of a spray-painted wooden board on which are screwed towel racks, switches and printed circuits connected in a tangle of cables - all connected to an amp, speaker, and car battery.

He scratches using a slider made from a magnetised spoon between two towel hooks, and his fader is cobbled together from a plastic bottle cap.

Fixes are done without breaking the flow - at one point, DJ Boboss whips out a screwdriver, strips a wire with his teeth and repairs a fault while the music keeps playing.

"I've never seen anything like that in the world," smiled David Meshack, who works in a nearby electronics store that sells professional turntables.

"One day, a customer came in with a photo of it. He wanted the same one but I didn't know what it was," he said. "Today, I see it!"

Boboss is an acronym for "Be your own boss" and Mwangi got his start repairing radios.

"My dad bought me a radio. After some time it stopped 'talking' and he said he wouldn't buy another one. I was stressed because I was addicted to music and listening to radio, so I just opened it using a knife," he said.

Soon he was repairing electronic devices in his village near Meru in central Kenya. Then one day he saw a DJ in a bar and was inspired.

"I loved how he played music and the way the crowd reacted. I didn't have the money to buy real equipment but I said I could make my own with the available resources."

Mwangi moved to the capital and now makes a living from his DJing and occasionally selling specially-commissioned turntables. AFP