Ago Gazo: "Something older than us"

Some projects are born from a place. Others are born from movement.

Ago Gazo belongs to neither France nor Togo exclusively. It inhabits the space in between, a territory shaped by encounters, journeys, memories and transformations. Traditional percussion meets modular synthesis, ancestral practices collide with contemporary club culture, yet nothing feels forced or exoticized. Everything remains alive, in motion.

In this conversation, Ago Gazo reflects on ritual and trance, on the meaning of community in an increasingly fragmented world, and on music as a collective act rather than a product to consume. Their perspective is both grounded and expansive: rooted in lived experience, yet open to futures where identities are fluid, cultures remain porous, and sound becomes a way of sharing rather than dividing.

Because perhaps culture has never been about purity.

It has always been about human beings moving, meeting, exchanging and sharing.

Welcome. Your music emerges between Togo and France, between heat, slowness and transformation. Do you experience this project as a bridge between geographies, or as a space where those boundaries dissolve completely?

We see Ago Gazo as a territory in its own right. An entity infused with diverse cultures, yet developing its own language. We are not trying to hide where the different elements of our music come from, but rather to make them collide or embrace depending on the direction we choose.

Through Ago Gazo, we deliver an aestheticized vision of our reality. We are musicians from diverse backgrounds, with diverse tastes, and our music is crafted between France and Togo. The idea is therefore to transcend our porosity through music, to make these subtle blends happening within us audible.

Traditional Togolese percussion and modular synthesis coexist in your sound. Do you see this encounter as a dialogue, or as a transformation where both languages lose something in order to become something new?

There are no real rules in the way we create our music. We place equal importance on our sound sources, whether they come from traditional Togolese music or electronic instruments.

What interests us is the way we bring these sounds into relation with one another. Sometimes the whole can be blended together, sometimes placed in tension, or one can serve the other. The way these sounds interact truly depends on where we want to take the track, aesthetically or emotionally.

The more we experiment in the studio, the more the field of possibilities opens up. The ways in which these sounds can meet are infinite.

Your tracks feel deeply trance-oriented, almost ritualistic. Do you think contemporary club culture is still capable of holding that collective, almost spiritual dimension, or has it become something more individual and fragmented?

I think there are three dimensions that can be distinguished in this question: ritual, trance, and the spiritual aspect.

What we understand as “club culture” can refer to the places where contemporary Western dance music is played, but it can also go far beyond that, into more underground, freer parties, further removed from the commercial aspect and the “sanitary” and “legislative” controls that clubs in our countries are subjected to.

If we embrace club culture in all its richness, then yes, in many ways, one can find a phenomenon of trance within it, in the sense that dancers can often reach states of exaltation that transport them outside the real world. However, these trances are not spaces of communication, but rather personal journeys.

Furthermore, club culture seems to carry a ritual aspect in the sense that its practice is governed by a certain number of customs. Yet these customs are not immutable and are dictated more by practical usage than by spirituality.

This is why it is difficult to speak of a spiritual practice of dancefloors and dance itself.

For our part, we prefer to speak of a “poetic” use. These practices connect us to an ethereal form of life, of reality, yet they are not part of any belief system or cosmogony whatsoever.

And we must not forget that the majority of places where this culture can be expressed — clubs, festivals, venues — are not conceived as spaces of surrender in the sense of collective ritual trance. The audience is included there as “spectators,” accessing monetized entertainment in sanitized and controlled spaces.

Yet it is only when the audience is considered an active part of the event that a celebration can become a space-time of trance.

The idea of “gazo” as a constant presence in daily life suggests music as something inseparable from existence, rather than something consumed as content. Do you feel your work reactivates that original function of music, bringing it back into everyday life and collective experience?

Gazo is indeed an everyday music for the Ewe people. It is played at every moment of daily life, but also during important occasions — mourning, weddings and celebrations.

It is also a music that speaks about everyday life through its lyrics, always with a double or even triple poetic meaning, sometimes almost sarcastic. Like sung proverbs, forms of wisdom reminding us of the cyclical nature of existence.

I do not think Ago Gazo is reactivating anything. This practice is still very alive in Ewe countries.

Moreover, gazo is performed collectively, between percussionists and singers. It is this anchoring in the body that gives it its vitality — we are far from an Ago Gazo track streamed from a phone or computer.

We are bringing Gazo into another universe.

There is a strong sense of movement in your music - not just physical, but almost migratory. Do you think sound today reflects broader movements of people, identities and cultures across borders?

Ago Gazo is the result of a contemporary reality, but also of something as old as the world itself: human beings move, meet, exchange, and share. And thankfully so.

The strength of life comes from genetic mixing, and the same applies to the richness of our cultures.

I do not know whether Ago Gazo reflects anything in particular, but in any case it carries within it the fruit of a history that goes beyond our individual existences.

One could obviously speak about the history of relations between France and West Africa, shaped by colonialism and slavery.

But ultimately, we come back to something concrete: in the present moment, we are musicians from different origins, cultures and sensibilities who enjoy sharing and creating collectively.

Working between local traditions and global electronic scenes can create tension. How do you avoid reducing cultural elements into aesthetics, keeping them alive rather than decorative?

The idea behind Ago Gazo comes from a simple observation: human communities, whatever their origins, have all developed collective practices involving music, dance and singing.

Gazo is a traditional music, song and dance form whose origins are said to trace back to ancestors who descended from Egypt even before Antiquity.

Contemporary dance music, on the other hand, has a much more recent history, born from a capitalist Western culture cut off from its ancestral roots.

Yet both tend toward a collective practice of music and dance that allows for a kind of emotional cleansing within a given group.

Starting from this subjective observation — we do not claim to be musicologists — we have not hierarchized these cultures. We embrace them as a whole because they are deeply important to each of us, obviously in different ways.

But who are we to judge the value of a culture if it represents an important part of someone else’s identity?

That being said, this does not mean one can simply pick from musical traditions without understanding their cultural stakes.

Ago Gazo is the result of more than ten years of back-and-forth journeys between France and Togo.

Throughout these years, Vidock, Ago Gazo’s producer, has recorded, met people, exchanged ideas, and explored gazo as well as many other forms of traditional music.

He has gained a certain knowledge of this music, but above all, these journeys have shaped a poetic vision straddling several cultures, shared by the whole group, which forms the foundation of Ago Gazo’s music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=od0RQVqmjtE

If music is increasingly shaped by global circulation, digital speed, and constant transformation, do you imagine its future moving toward more hybrid, fluid forms - or do you believe there will still be a need to return to something more grounded, physical and rooted in place and community?

I think both coexist and will continue to coexist.

For example, among the most exciting scenes in electronic music today are contemporary African scenes — shingele, amapiano and many others. They often start from traditional musical foundations, hybridized, pushed to extremes or reinterpreted through contemporary instruments.

All of this emerges in countries where musical traditions are still very much alive.

On the other hand, in Europe, the scenes I would call neo-folk are extremely vibrant. We are witnessing the emergence and consolidation of many groups rediscovering, interpreting or hybridizing local traditional music from France and other European countries.

In any case, every artist is a transmitter, inhabited by something greater than themselves, delivering a work that is the digestion of their past and their environment… more or less interesting!