Auntie Flo has got something for your mind your body and your soul…

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It’s not often that arch raconteur Luke Una is lost for words. But last October, the grand entertaining conscience of electronic/leftfield dance music was found failing to articulate the astonishment in which he held one of his recent sonic discoveries.

“It’s blown my mind,” he waxed lyrically on Instagram, as the sounds of an elongated, hypnotic funk-laden disco-cum-house groove emanated from his studio speakers. As the effervescent track approached the eight-minute mark and a vocal kicked in elevating the track to some other, higher transcendental portal, Una’s mind was blown further. “So fucking beautiful… Balearic, Afro, fucking fusion… dunno what you call it. It’s a belter.”

Auntie Flo’s majestic ‘Green City’ is indeed a belter. It’s a 15-minute trip into the outer reaches of genre agnostic dance music that was rightfully named Track of 2024 by the likes of Una, DJ History’s Furtive 50 (as voted for by the forum and “various milquetoasts and popinjays associated with Bill Brewster”) and this very publication. Not bad for a track that Brian d’Souza, the inspirational figure behind Auntie Flo, had reconciled to being “not as good as I thought it was” after various DJs he sent it to ahead of last year’s Glastonbury didn’t react as he hoped.

“It was when Luke got on board that I thought: ‘Finally!’” the gently-spoken Scottish musical polymath recalls a few months later. “I’d sent it to a few folk and wasn’t really getting much of a response. But he came back with his sort of stream of consciousness thing that he does. Finally, someone got it in the way I did.” He stops and adds thoughtfully: “Because you do question yourself.”

‘Green City’ (named after Nairobi – d’Souza has Kenyan heritage) is emblematic of how Auntie Flo views music. The track, initially started in 2019 as a field recording, was built up with the help of various collaborators, including Kokoroko’s Yohan Kebede on keys and Ziggy Funk on guitar. It was the addition of Ambassa Mandela’s vocals – fittingly recorded in Nairobi – that completed the jigsaw. Music as an infectious blend of sounds (in this case Western and African) that demonstrate the ridiculous artificial boundaries between cultures and people? 

“Yeah, 100 per cent,” he avows. “Music is such a connecting and powerful force.”

This sense of assemblage and various strands underpinning Auntie Flo becomes even more apparent when you start to untangle d’Souza’s work. There are innumerable conversations you could have with him about music. Not only is he a DJ, producer, musician (although he declares himself not to be in any traditional sense) and label boss, but he also works within the realms of digital sound therapy, sound installations and bio-sonification (the biological sound of nature). 

His work exists at the intersection of science, nature and the cultural, economic and political impulse of music. The themes of migration, multiculturalism and the diaspora all reside in his world. And it all comes together under the umbrella of his label A State Of Flo, which is also home to his musical wellbeing Ambient Flo radio station.

“The label is this world building exercise,” he explains. “I’m trying to find where I’m placed on a map and build a kind of structure that makes sense to anyone that’s interested.”

Auntie Flo’s heritage – his family hail from Goa and Kenya – allied to his Scottish birthplace mean maps, boundaries and identity all play a central part in his music. His multifarious sounds are often described as world music and the questions that arise from that – the well-intentioned side of world music versus notions of cultural appropriation - are something he clearly grapples with.

“What gives me the rights to collaborate with a Kenyan singer?” he asks. “Is it because of my heritage? I wouldn’t say so, it’s just about coming together and making music on the sort of purest level.”

As simple as that?

“Yeah, as simple as that,” he responds. “Why should it be any more complicated? Music is this amazing, special, magical thing that allows us to communicate non-verbally; to travel through sound or whatever. And to block some sort of access because it’s something that’s protected by a certain culture in your head, but perhaps not by that culture itself – and who represents a culture anyway? No one really – that becomes a self-defeating notion I think.”

Of course, without Auntie Flo’s intoxicating sounds none of this would matter. Last year’s excellent longplayer ‘In My Dreams (I’m a Bird and I’m Free)’ is about to be followed up by ‘Birds of Paradise’. Whereas ‘In My Dreams’ was a series of collaborations with musicians across the world, ‘Birds of Paradise’ (his fifth studio album) is just Auntie Flo.

“This is me in the studio playing around and coming up with ideas. Therefore it’s an instrumental record. It’s essentially more of a club or dance record I guess.” A case in point is the majestic ‘Ceibo’, a mini-epic (compared to ‘Green City’) that takes in techno, Afrobeat and Highlife in one seven-minute dancefloor-slaying package. 

Alongside finishing ‘Birds of Paradise’ – a recent visit to Goa and Kenya saw him assemble some new field recordings to provide the record with further textures – and preparing a new live show, d’Souza is also working on a generative AI app that explores the different ways in which sound and frequencies of sound affect your brain.

“That gets to the bare bones of sound waves and frequencies,” he explains. “I’m equally as interested in that as the cultural connections that music can bring. These are two completely disparate areas to explore; you’re down to the mechanistic, the physics of it. But then you’ve also got this huge cultural space that connects all human beings in a way.”

Having previously kept these fascinating topics separate, d’Souza can now see a way in which his sound-related passions can converge. 

“I think that now is the best time that there’s ever been in my lifetime to be able to have these conversations,” he finishes. “When I started doing this there was a lot more hedonistic culture around losing yourself on the dancefloor and going on the sesh. And these could be hugely informative for the rest of your life; you could have epiphanies on the dancefloor. You can meet your life partner on the dancefloor – as I did. But you wouldn’t really want to be thinking about the science. What was actually underpinning it! That would ruin the whole bloody thing, talking like that, you’d be a pariah, right. I feel like there’s more scope to have this kind of conversation now. Which is why I feel there’s an opportunity to bring my two worlds together.”

It’s time to go with the Flo.

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.