The Summer Anthem DJs Couldn’t Leave Home Without

DJ Shimza put it plainly in his own notes for Karma Karma Radio 014: MoBlack’s “Mandjou” was one of the biggest anthems of his summer, and it did not matter where he played it, the reaction was always the same. That is a strange thing to say about a record built around a vocal first recorded in 1978. It is also exactly the point.

Shimza is not easily impressed. His Karma Karma Radio mix, published October 16, is a working DJ’s document of what actually moved rooms over the summer, and the track he singles out is a patient, unhurried Afro house record by an Italian producer who spent ten years living in Ghana. MoBlack is Mimmo Falcone, founder of MoBlack Records, a label widely credited as one of Afro house’s foundational imprints, and co-founder of MoDef with David Morales. He has spent decades as the conduit between African music and the dancefloor, as a producer, a DJ, a selector and an A&R. “Mandjou” is the sound of all of that experience arriving at once.

The record itself is a collaboration in the fullest sense. Released July 24 via Decca Records France, it pairs MoBlack with Bedouin and Feki Station and builds itself around the voice of Salif Keita, the Malian singer whose golden voice has carried across five decades. The song is Keita’s own: “Mandjou” was originally the title track of his 1978 album with Les Ambassadeurs Internationaux, and it reached a wider international audience through the re-recorded version on his 1995 album Folon. MoBlack did not sample it and run. By his own account, the track began as a spark in 2024 and evolved over the following two years into a collaboration with Bedouin, Keita and Feki Station. Bedouin have described it as one of their most requested IDs, the kind of record crowds ask about before the night is over.

That slow build is audible. “Mandjou” grows rather than drops. Organic instrumentation and deep percussion carry Keita’s vocal forward while the groove gathers underneath it, and the track never rushes the moment. It preserves the emotional weight of the original while translating it for a contemporary dancefloor, which is a harder trick than it sounds. Plenty of producers have borrowed a great African vocal and dressed it in a beat. Fewer have built a record that treats the voice as the centre and lets everything else serve it.

It helps that MoBlack has done this before, and recently. His official rework of Keita’s “Yamore” earned Diamond certification in France and five-times Diamond certification worldwide, a result that turned a respectful rework into one of the most visible examples of classic African vocal recordings finding a second life inside modern club sets. “Mandjou” extends the same idea with a bigger table: Bedouin bring the melodic, atmospheric club architecture they have honed around their SAGA party in Ibiza, and Feki Station adds another layer, with support across MoBlack Records and attention from names like Black Coffee, Keinemusik and Damian Lazarus.

And then, almost before the summer anthem has cooled, there is a follow-up in the same lane. “Mounkera,” MoBlack’s rework of Djanka Diabate, arrived October 16 on MoBlack Records, the same day Shimza’s mix went out. It is built the same way: Diabate’s original vocal stays at the centre, percussion and low end gather around it, and the record runs just over five minutes at 120 BPM. MoBlack has said her voice stayed with him from the first listen, timeless and raw and deeply emotional, and that he set out to build an entirely new musical world around it rather than simply placing the vocal over a new production. The pattern is now unmistakable. He finds a voice with history in it, and he gives it a room to fill.

That is what makes him such a natural Antidote subject. The magazine has always been interested in the DJs, the listening bars and the records built out of other people’s records, and MoBlack is the person doing that work at the highest level without ever treating the source material as raw material. He lived in Ghana for a decade. He runs the label. He does the A&R. The records he makes carry that biography in them, and the dancefloor can hear it. Shimza could not leave home without “Mandjou” all summer. By November, the question is not whether the record works. It is how many rooms it has left to play.

For a magazine relaunching on a Monday, there is something fitting about starting here: not with a new face, but with a conduit. MoBlack does not make the loudest record of the week. He makes the one the best DJs keep reaching for, and the one whose vocal was already a classic before most of the dancefloor was born.