Sven Kacirek is a Nairobi-based German percussionist and electronicist who has been deeply engaged with East African music for a couple of decades. In 2018, he began collaborating with vocalist Olith Ratego under the name Odd Okoddo.
Ratego is a singular figure in contemporary Kenyan culture: a skilled singer of dodo, a song and dance tradition of the Luo community in western Kenya, usually performed by women at weddings, funerals and social gatherings. Having learned the tradition from his mother, Ratego subverts it by challenging gender norms and transforming it into a looser, slower version of the genre, sung in the Dholuo language, which he calls ‘dodo blues’.
