Kabeaushé is a pop artist, singer, rapper, and producer from Nairobi, based in Berlin – but those titles barely contain the universe he builds around himself. He is known for incorporating a wide range of influences from music, film, and painting into his extravagant works. When our interview begins, the first thing that strikes me is the wall behind Kabochi, a collection of artworks ranging from photography to posters and art pieces. As we speak, they feel like keys to his worldbuilding. The wall reflects his multidisciplinary talent and, in many ways, serves as a preview of his upcoming album:
KABEAUSHÈ PRESENTS: IGGY SWAGGERING UNGRATEFUL INCESSANT LITTLE PEEEAAAAAAA
(Yes, you read that right).
At the time of our conversation, he’s in the final stretch before stepping back into the live arena. “It’s going really well,” he says of rehearsals. “We have two more days, and then we go to Prague, Slovenia, and then mostly Germany. I’m from Nairobi, I’m in Germany, and I get to do this,” he says. “It’s fun!”
“He’s a very curious character,” he tells me when I ask about his alter ego, Kabeaushé. It’s a curiosity that isn’t passive; it moves, it hunts, it wants to test the limits. Fun, to him, isn’t a mood you stumble into; it’s something you find by going further. “If you’re curious, you’re curious enough to go and find the fun on the other side of the hill,” he explains.
That curiosity is also what makes the persona feel less like a mask and more like a heightened version of the self. “I don’t even think there’s a difference between Kabochi and me in this,” he says. “It’s more or less the same. I get to wear a wig, I get to play with costumes, and be as theatrical as possible on stage.” The stage becomes a space where ideas can be dressed up and exaggerated, but once the costume comes off, the core remains.
On the upcoming album, the character of Kabeaushé evolves into a new figure named Herr IGGY, ruler of the fictional Doerf Kingdom. Kabeaushé describes the project as layered role-play. He keeps the symbolism intentionally open. “The kingdom can mean whatever you want it to mean; the name, too, is left for the listener to interpret.” Herr Iggy’s arc is a rise-and-collapse story: a peasant background, a climb to power, then ego as the undoing. Across the album, the listener gets a dramatised portrait of how someone who’s very full of themselves can fall. The references aren’t scholarly so much as cinematic: Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible and Alexander Nevsky. “For me, it’s not even historical, it’s more the films,” he explains, pulling from the spectacle and psychology of leadership as portrayed on screen. Michael Mwangi Maina and Fred Odede, respectively director and cinematographer, helped bring that vision to life.
The project took shape over time. IGGY was a character originally sketched back in 2020, initially “slumped back” and “more whimsical,” later transformed by the gravitational pull of Barry Lyndon. Eventually, a shared language emerged, shaped by European cinema of the 1920s and African filmmakers like Mambéty. “For me, purity of intention is much more important than anything,” he says. That “purity” also has a spiritual backbone. After listening to his previous projects and watching his performances, I tell him that his crowd work reminds me of a Black church, not as an aesthetic gimmick, but as a physical energy. He smiles; his answer is immediate. “I’m so glad you noticed that. I’m Kenyan, I’m Christian.” The influence is inescapable, woven into how he understands performance itself. “In church, the congregation responds: It’s a give-and-take relationship, everyone is in on the thing.” On stage, he aims for that same shared connection and excitement.
The visual language for the covers follows the same rule as the music: it has to match. If Basquiat echoes in the previous covers, it’s a subconscious proximity. The idea here is translation: a cover that looks like what the music already sounds like in his mind. He designs them himself, developing them alongside the music. Sometimes the songs are nearly finished while the artwork is still forming, or the artwork is there first, and the music has to catch up.
For this album’s cover, he wanted to explore what “the African version of a thing” looks like, how stories are reimagined and relocated visually. He turns to the wall and points to the poster recreations from Accra that reinterpret films like Stop Making Sense, The Warriors or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as inspirations. The goal here was to reshape foreign narratives through a different visual language.
For Kabeaushé, the work is never only music; it’s about building universes. He credits his love for cinema to Wes Anderson, Jacques Tati, Tarantino, and Djibril Diop Mambéty. “I want to give the same feeling in my work. The vinyl should make you curious enough to watch the music videos; the music videos should pull you deeper into the music; the show should return you to the same world through set design.”
All Photography by Fred Odede
He didn’t study music or film. He developed multiple interests since childhood, one of them being theatre, which led him to be part of a big production in Nairobi later in life, for MTV’s Shuga, an experience that exposed him to large-scale production. His musical education mirrors the same logic. It started with free beats on YouTube, experimentation with a DAW, and then the urge to build worlds himself. The goal was never to chase templates, but rather sounds that felt just like him. The album carries both African and European influences, developed in collaboration with composer Rui Rodrigues.
There’s something notably free in the atmosphere around Kabeaushé’s shows, especially now, in an era of surveillance and self-consciousness. He tells me about the religious crusades back home, on the streets of Nairobi, with sound distortion and very loud speakers. Yet people still gather, and once praise and worship reach that tipping point, the crowd becomes one body. “That’s magic,” he says. “What’s annoying when you live inside it becomes beautiful when you step away and see it clearly.” That’s the sonic spirit he pushes forward in the new album, the in-your-face mix, the punch, the falsettos reminiscent of church choirs across the African continent.
His philosophy of live performance has evolved since his very first European show in Brussels. His original idea of what a performance should look like was built on watching legends: AC/DC, Michael Jackson, and Prince. Now, he instigates. “I will light a fire,” he says. “If the fire catches, it’s good. If it doesn’t, it’s okay.” The best shows are the ones where he loses control: when the audience starts singing on their own, when pits form, when the night becomes communal rather than performed at. That detachment extends to rollout and reception too: the humbling reality that people never obsess over the same details you do.
KABEAUSHÈ PRESENTS: IGGY SWAGGERING UNGRATEFUL INCESSANT LITTLE PEEEAAAAAAA is released on the 27th February, marking the next chapter in Kabeaushé’s ever-expanding universe. Following the first shows, the tour continues across Germany, bringing Herr Iggy’s rise and unraveling on the stage as the Doerf Kingdom comes to life.