Reintroducing Dahi: “As a producer, you’re servicing other artists and helping uplift their ideas. This was the time for me to do that myself”A decade ago, Dahi had a revelation.
The producer was holed up at Jungle City Studios in Manhattan with a cast of incredible musicians, including acclaimed producer Sounwave and keys player Danny Keyz, jamming out in free-flowing sessions led by his longtime collaborator, Kendrick Lamar. “Everybody was naturally taking a role and aiding whatever the record needed: bassline, melody, rhythm, hooklines… the music just came so easy,” Dahi recalls to MusicTech. That music would ultimately turn into Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2017 record Damn.
Dahi on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Brianna Alysse for MusicTech
Dahi – then known as DJ Dahi – was already a sought-after producer, having broken out over a three-year streak with Money Trees from Lamar’s album Good Kid, m.A.A.D City, Drake’s Worst Behavior and multiplatinum Big Sean single I Don’t Fuck With You. Even Madonna tapped him for her own 2015 album, Rebel Heart (produced alongside Avicii and BloodPop). But it turned out Dahi still had much to learn.
“That experience really taught me about collaboration,” he says of the Damn. sessions. “We created so many ideas in a matter of 24 hours, and it triggered me like, ‘I feel like I’ve been doing this shit wrong for the longest time, because usually it’s just me in the studio making beats.’ I realised I needed to figure out how to bring some spontaneity into the room.”
This marked a huge shift for Dahi, who has since earned a Grammy Award and produced for the likes of SZA, Nas, Vampire Weekend, Childish Gambino, and Kali Uchis. The track that catapulted him to fame, Money Trees, showcases his inventive approach to sampling: its brooding, beautiful hip-hop groove was built around a tiny burst of ethereal interplay between guitar and electric organ, plucked from the song Silver Soul by dream pop band Beach House and reversed. Later, tracks including Gravity (Brent Faiyaz, Tyler, the Creator) and Grammy-winning single A Lot (21 Savage, J. Cole) cemented Dahi’s reputation for building anthemic hip-hop tunes around slightly skewed, left-field melodic samples; the former used a chopped-up Steve Lacy guitar loop, the latter dug up a little-known 70s soul track from East of Underground, a US army band stationed in Germany.
Image: Brianna Alysse for MusicTech
Now, 20 years on from his very first production credit, Dahi is making his own solo statement – one whose process was anchored in collaborative live performance. “I should’ve made this album 10 years ago, but it was a long process figuring out my own lane of creation,” he says of his upcoming record, Black Boy (Alternative). “As a producer, you’re servicing other artists and helping uplift their ideas. I felt like this was the time for me to do that myself, and see what flourishes.”
To realise his vision, he called upon A-list collaborators from across his career, but also formed a core band: guitarist Danny McKinnon (Free Nationals, Anderson .Paak), keys player Ely Rise (Childish Gambino, SZA), rhythm section master John Key (Solange Knowles), plus London-based artist Jonah Stevens, whom Dahi describes as “an incredible textural sound guy and a really amazing producer”.
“When we’re in the room, I call it music trading cards,” he adds. “It wasn’t just Dahi and the all-stars; everybody meets each other halfway in the process. I’m like, ‘what are you listening to?’ and vice versa… let’s try and figure out a through-line. A few ideas started with just me and Danny together; I’d play bass, pull up a drum loop, or figure out a rhythm. There are records like They Don’t Know that started with a whole different groove, but the chords and the feel of the record felt really good… You have to make sense of it.”
He continues: “The key, to me, is having a similar taste in music. We love things that feel left of centre, and trying to figure out how to create that balance in a song. You’re trying shit and seeing what sticks. And we got something that felt really special.”
“The idea of a band and musicianship in pop music today has become kind of a lost art”
The Alternative Path
As a young child, Dahi quickly grasped the power of live instrumentation. Born Dacoury Dahi Natche, he grew up in Inglewood, California, the son of a mother from North Carolina and a father from Côte d’Ivoire. His first dabblings in music came thanks to his stepdad’s penchant for hoarding second-hand musical instruments.
“My stepdad would go and buy random instruments at swap meets for $20, and the funny thing is he didn’t really know how to play any of those instruments. He just thought they were cool to have in the house,” Dahi says. “It sparked my interest in sound and what you could do with an instrument. I picked them up, I started playing them, I didn’t really know what I was doing, but it was a form of expression. From there, it was about learning about how to read music, taking classes, and formulating an idea of how these different genres and sounds and styles of music told a narrative.”
In this sense, film also played a crucial role in his early creative development. He noted the huge storytelling potential of song, and remembers being struck by movies like Chariots of Fire (with its iconic Vangelis score) that showed “how music can be part of the grander scheme of life… Experiencing the trials and tribulations of being an athlete, the perseverance, and how music can give you cues and help tell a story.”
Image: Brianna Alysse for MusicTech
Styled partly as a letter to his younger self, Black Boy (Alternative) weaves together the different musical movements and cultures that have influenced him most in his life: chiefly 90s rock music, West African soul, and experimental hip-hop. Dahi has even described the record as “African Radiohead”, and in the outro to the single Running (a collaboration with Childish Gambino) – with its complex guitar and rhythm sections interlocking mesmerisingly against a jumpy 6/8 time signature, a saxophone echoing in the distance – that term makes total sense.
West African soul is stitched into the fabric of the record; highlights include the clean, sunny intro to Love Me featuring Nigerian-British vocalist Obongjayar, where Danny McKinnon’s soft, intricate guitar melody pulses with the alacrity of a cuckoo’s call. “We layered multiple guitar rhythms over each other, almost like having a looper pedal on and stacking different parts together, making small incremental changes that made the music feel like it was evolving,” Dahi explains.
There’s a continued commitment to Dahi’s staple of soulful, inventive hip-hop; on tracks like Who Are You (featuring Vince Staples and Channel Tres) and How To Pray (featuring Kendrick Lamar and Amber Mark), Dahi’s textured, thoughtfully constructed instrumentals provide the perfect platform for ruminations on identity, responsibility, and trust. During the recording process, Dahi scoured his creative archives for sparks of inspiration, with several tracks first taking root years ago.
Image: Brianna Alysse for MusicTech
“Make notes, save shit, and review it once in a while. You’ll hear it differently; that’s the magic of music,” he says. “Don’t throw away anything. Sometimes the way of the world won’t allow you to hear an idea in a certain context, or it’s just not ready. We live in a generation of instant gratification, where if it’s not hitting then it ain’t good – the world is deaf right now. But you have to keep pushing forward and know that what you made is really great.”
He continues: “The idea of a band and musicianship in pop music today has become kind of a lost art: how to bring musicians together, and those musicians having a specific style that creates a signature sound and feel. It reminds me of how records were formed back in the day; everybody came in and did their part, from arrangers to session players, different types of engineers – it was an assembly of people. That was something I wanted in my career.”
“Being a producer still takes somebody that can come in and finish a job or an idea”
Do The Work
Dahi’s recording process is hardware-heavy. Channelling those early interactions with his stepdad’s instruments, he constantly moves around the studio, trying out basslines, playing with samplers, constructing beats. “It’s how I’ve learned to get out of ruts creatively; jumping on a different piece of hardware, it can click, like ‘I remember when I had this idea, or I did this thing’. You’re collecting a bunch of ideas over time,” he says.
Across the guitar-heavy record, he regularly relied on his trusty Fender Telecaster, aiming for a straight drive sound with limited reverb. “A lot of the sounds were DI, not a lot of amping,” he says. “I wanted something that didn’t feel glossed up. It was more about the style of guitar playing rather than the guitar having this special tone.” Dahi also made extensive use of Sequential’s iconic analogue synth, the Prophet-5, and other favourite vintage keyboards like the Mellotron and Roland’s Jupiter-4.
He also used a complex combination, “about half and half”, of live and programmed drums, seeing this as a way of bringing worlds together to create “a tone of drums that’s sometimes very hard to recreate live because you don’t have the kit or the recording stuff.”
Image: Brianna Alysse for MusicTech
That’s a challenge that will grow over the coming weeks and months, as Dahi works out how best to perform Black Boy (Alternative) live. “It’s interesting doing something with an album that’s heavily featuring other artists,” he muses. “We want people to feel like they’re at one of our jam sessions. It’s a revolving door of talent, with some of the best musicians in the world. You’re gonna hear different sorts of music in a space that makes sense, once they’re presented with a through-line.”
Another challenge will be performing vocals live for the first time. Lead single Rest of Your Life sees Dahi take to the mic, delivering a hypnotic, fuzzy falsetto, cranked daringly close to the red using Universal Audio’s Neve 1073 plugin, that builds slowly before bursting through to break the calm, considered structure of the track in its final throes. It’s another hurdle-jump in his mission to carve out a fresh, ambitious solo path for himself.
“How do you make something with feeling and style? You’ve still gotta do the work”
“Having my voice on the record is significant,” he reflects. “I knew I had to have some type of singing or expression that came originally from me, and this felt good. It’s super important to me that the rhythm felt intoxicating, tribal, and ceremonial.”
Seeing this totally new side from an artist of such longevity is fascinating. Dahi has been in the game a long time, and the world of production has changed dramatically since his early days making music. How does he see the landscape for young beatmakers? “AI is the biggest thing, man. Anyone can make a beat now,” he says. “There are tutorial videos on YouTube on how to get certain sounds, and so much information about how to make music. But the biggest thing is having love for making records. Being a producer still takes somebody that can come in and finish a job or an idea. How do you make something with feeling and style? You’ve still gotta do the work.”
Dahi’s Black Boy (Alternative) is out 28 August via ALTER Music.
Words: Fred Garratt-Stanley
Photography: Brianna Alysse
Location: Department of Recording and Power
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