Azzi On The Beat has built an artistic identity around making beats in front of an audience, placing the creative process itself at the centre of the performance.
For decades, music producers have largely operated out of view, their names appearing in credits while vocalists and instrumentalists command the stage. Azzi On The Beat has spent recent years dismantling that arrangement. Instead of treating production as a behind-the-scenes craft, he constructs rhythms, textures and arrangements live, turning the studio workflow into a public spectacle.
“I sat down one day and thought about how producers are always in the background of the work,” he explains. “The musician takes centre stage, and the producer is either a feature credit or completely invisible.”
From Dance to Live Production
Azzi On The Beat’s approach is rooted in an upbringing that placed performance at the centre of daily life. Raised on the outskirts of Bariga, he left home at age five and grew up within Footprint of David, a creative academy in Bariga where multiple art forms coexisted. Dance, singing, drums and percussion were all part of the environment.
“My growing up was rooted in a dancing group,” he says. “The academy had different aspects of art. We did singing, dancing, drums, all of that.”
For a long time, dance appeared to be his path. The shift toward music came later, when he examined which form of expression felt most natural. That decision led him to production, though the influence of movement never disappeared. Unlike producers who use the stage only to replay finished tracks, Azzi treats performance as an interactive space. He works with a background track as a foundation and builds everything else live, reading the room and adjusting direction based on the energy in front of him.
The Horn and the Masquerade
A recurring element in his sets is a horn, which audiences began linking to traditional masquerade imagery. Over time, the comparison evolved into a defining part of his public identity.
“People started relating my horn to a masquerade,” he says. “Whenever I want to perform, they see the horn and say, ‘Who is this big masquerade that is out?'”
For Azzi, the horn carries spiritual weight. Before most performances, he opens with a traditional chant, grounding the set in something older than the room he occupies. “The horn represents the gods for me,” he states. In many communities, the arrival of a masquerade transforms the energy of a gathering. Azzi’s interpretation borrows from that cultural significance while introducing a key distinction: his masquerade has a face. The performer remains visible, which aligns with a career built on making visible what usually stays hidden.
A Sound Beyond Genre
His music is often associated with Mara, but even that label comes with qualifications. “What I play is not related to Afro, not related to house. Mara is not boxed,” he explains. He describes his approach as futuristic, layering forward-facing textures onto a foundation that runs deeper than the music itself. Electronic elements sit alongside traditional sounds, and contemporary production techniques meet older forms of musical expression. The result feels neither entirely futuristic nor entirely rooted in the past, a tension he deliberately maintains.
Eyo Fusion and Cultural Continuity
That tension is most deliberately explored in “Eyo Fusion,” a project built around questions of cultural continuity. It asks what it means to carry tradition into the future and how ancestral sounds can survive without becoming frozen in time.
“The tradition never dies,” Azzi says. “Even though my sound is in the future, I still have to bring the ancestors’ chants into it.”
A full Azzi set reflects this clearly. Traditional chants appear alongside electronic abstractions, and live percussionists and chanters share the stage with production equipment. His February Boiler Room set drew a tightly packed crowd and sustained audience engagement, with people pressing close and noise coming from every direction. He moved through the performance explaining, “Practice makes perfect. I do this every day.”
