Contained in the studio with Eyram Gbewonyo, the producer turning Accra into Africa’s most enjoyable music capital
The beat drops at 2 AM in a dimly lit Accra studio, and immediately the room is alive. Conventional Ghanaian percussion loops fold into themselves, spiraling by layers of digital synthesis till you’ll be able to’t inform the place the highlife ends and the home music begins. That is Afrolektra’s playground—a sonic laboratory the place ancestral rhythms get passport stamps to the long run.
Eyram Gbewonyo doesn’t make beats. He builds worlds. In 2025, his fingerprints are in every single place. Three albums he touched—Gyakie’s After Midnight, Black Sherif’s Iron Boy, Omar Sterling’s VTH 2—all claimed the No. 1 spot on Apple Music Ghana. It’s the sort of dominance that makes you surprise if there’s one thing within the water, or if Gbewonyo merely understands the frequency at which trendy Ghana vibrates.
In 2010, a younger Gbewonyo downloads Fruity Loops and VirtualDJ on a whim. The software program is clunky, the laptop computer struggles, however one thing clicks. He’d grown up swimming in sound—marching band formations, church choir harmonies, the ambient symphony of Accra itself. Music idea wasn’t one thing he realized; it was one thing he breathed.
However manufacturing was totally different. Manufacturing was structure. It was selecting which drum sample carries the emotional weight, which synth line makes the hair in your arms rise up, when to let silence communicate louder than noise.
By 2015, the interest had metastasized into obsession. Gbewonyo began reaching out to business professionals, testing his creations in opposition to the market’s brutal honesty. The bed room producer graduated to actual studios, actual artists, actual stakes. The DJ decks got here alongside for the trip—a pure evolution for somebody who noticed remixing not as destruction however as resurrection, taking acquainted songs and revealing secret lives hidden of their DNA.
What makes an Afrolektra manufacturing recognizable isn’t a signature sound—it’s a signature philosophy. He operates within the pressure between preservation and innovation, refusing to deal with African musical traditions as museum items whereas concurrently rejecting the notion that modernization means westernization.
Take heed to Black Sherif’s “Insurgent Music” and also you’ll hear it: drums that would soundtrack each a village competition and a Berlin nightclub, melodies that honor their origins with out being shackled to them. That is fusion that doesn’t announce itself, doesn’t beg for credit score. It merely exists, assured in its multiplicity.
His DJ units throughout Ghana’s competition circuit—Afrofuture, Chale Wote Avenue Artwork Competition, Accravaganza, Manifestivities—function on the identical precept. He’s not simply taking part in information; he’s conducting conversations between eras, genres, continents. The dancefloor turns into a portal the place previous and future collapse into an everlasting, rhythmic current.
Discuss to Afrolektra about his work, and he’ll redirect you to the artists. It’s not false modesty—it’s a real perception that nice manufacturing is about excavation, about discovering what’s already inside a music and amplifying it till it glows.
With Gyakie, for whom he produced 4 tracks on After Midnight together with “Hire Free,” “Unconditional,” and “I’m Not Taken” that includes Headie One, the chemistry is easy.
“Gyakie is one in every of my favourite collaborators,” he says. “She’s not only a nice author, she’s really an excellent producer additionally. She is aware of what she desires to listen to, all her many concepts, and I amplify these, taking them to the following degree.”
It’s a partnership of equals, each producers in their very own proper, pushing one another towards sounds neither may attain alone.
Omar Sterling’s VTH 2 supplied a unique sort of schooling. Afrolektra produced six tracks, together with “Increase Increase” that includes Reggie Osei, O’Kenneth and Jay Bahd, and “Positive Banker & Yawa” with Sarkodie. Working with an artist who’s been within the sport for many years, who carries the burden of Ghana’s hip-hop historical past in his verses, taught Gbewonyo that nice manufacturing is as a lot about listening as creating.
“Omar Sterling is not only a terrific rapper and lyricist. He lives no matter he says in his music, from previous experiences to his non secular path. I’m glad to have skilled him in studio as we put all these information collectively. As somebody who’s been in music and life for many years, he’s a instructor, and I’ve learnt quite a bit from his journey, even past the music.”
Then there’s the work with Camidoh on “Brown Pores and skin Lady” that includes Stonebwoy, R2bees’ “Positive Banker & Yawa,” and Offei’s “I Like”—every collaboration a unique puzzle, every requiring Afrolektra to shed his ego and grow to be a conduit for another person’s imaginative and prescient.
What drives a producer to spend fifteen years perfecting a craft that always goes uncredited? For Afrolektra, it’s about bridging gaps that shouldn’t exist within the first place. Why ought to digital dance music and African conventional rhythms occupy separate worlds? Why can’t a music make you need to dance in a membership in London and at a avenue competition in Accra?
His units at intimate venues like iMullar Sound System and bigger occasions like Zaama Disco and Outmosphere reveal this vary. One evening he’s soundtracking up to date artwork at Chale Wote, the following he’s holding down a warehouse rave. The context modifications however the mission stays: create areas the place totally different musical traditions cannot simply coexist however actively conspire with one another.
That is the Afrolektra methodology—not fusion for fusion’s sake, however a real perception that the way forward for African music isn’t about selecting between custom and modernity. It’s about recognizing that the selection itself is a false binary, a colonial hangover that must be discarded.
Proper now, African music is having its second on the worldwide stage. Afrobeats dominate charts, competition lineups bow to the facility of West African rhythms, and immediately everybody desires a chunk of the sound. However Afrolektra isn’t chasing tendencies—he’s creating them, quietly, from studios in Accra that many of the world won’t ever see.
His trajectory suggests one thing larger than private success. He represents a technology of African producers who grew up with your entire historical past of recorded music at their fingertips, who see no contradiction between honoring their roots and reaching for the celebrities, who perceive that probably the most attention-grabbing music has at all times occurred within the margins, the assembly locations, the borderlands between genres.
Three No. 1 albums in a single yr isn’t only a sizzling streak—it’s a declaration. Ghana’s music scene isn’t ready for validation from exterior. It’s constructing its personal infrastructure, its personal sound, its personal language. And Afrolektra? He’s one of many chief architects.
In his palms, a conventional drum sample turns into a prophecy, an digital bassline turns into an anchor to ancestry, and each music turns into proof that the way forward for music isn’t being written in New York or London or Los Angeles.
It’s being programmed in Accra. One beat at a time.
Authored by V. L. Ok. Djokoto
