About

The Mobile Rekodi Situdio is a community based not-for-profit initiative started by the Australian artist Royce Ng in Kenya in 2010 working with Raphael Omondi from the Pamoja Youth Foundation based in  the Kibera slums in Nairobi. The aim of the project is to offer professional music recording facilities to musicians who live in the Kibera area who would otherwise be unable to access or afford such services. The project also facilitates collaborations between musicians in Kibera with musicians and producers in Melbourne, Australia through an ongoing association with the independent record label Brother Sister Records. We would like to develop the initiative into a self-sustaining and independently managed recording facility open to musicians from all styles and backgrounds living in Kibera operated by the musicians themselves. 

Vision
Our ultimate goal is to promote self-empowerment for musicians living in low-income areas in Nairobi by enabling them to take control of every aspect of the music making process. As opposed to the vertically integrated model that currently dominates the music industry in Kenya in which artists are neither in control of how their music is produced or how it is disseminated we aim to take power away from record companies and a capital dominated music industry and move towards a horizontally integrated music economy in which artists will produce and release their own music through access to basic, consumer level music software and online music file sharing networks.

Facilities and Equipment

At the moment, the studio is currently situated in the former St. Aloysius High School in Kianda, Kibera which is the headquarters of the Pamoja Youth Foundation.

The equipment being used at the moment is a Behringer XENYX 1002FX Premium 10 Input 2-Bus Mixer with XENYX Mic Preamps with a 24-Bit Multi-FX Processor and one Behringer B-2 Pro, Dual Diaphram Conderser microphone. The mixer and microphone can be attached to any laptop and we are currently using the multi-track recording program Cool Edit Pro version 2.1.
The equipment in the studio is extremely basic at this stage in order to make it economically sustainable to continue to offer the services for free. As the project develops, we hope to offer ongoing training in the use of the equipment and the software to musicians. 


At the moment, we are also in need of some reasonable quality speakers to use as monitors.