Darlyne Komukama, a.k.a DJ Decay

Pretty Things: Darlyne Komukama, a.k.a DJ Decay, talks Novelty, Aesthetics, and the Power of Aliases

Darlyne Komukama is a Ugandan multi-disciplinary artist and a charismatic personality who can be both playful with her work as well as delivering a cutting-edge insight into topics that fall within the realm of pop culture, society and politics.

She started out as a writer and photographer, an interest drawn from her love of film, but the self-taught photographer and installation artist wanted to create art that people, specifically women, could interact with. “This was my dream,” she said, “How can I get people to be in the photo?” Her answer to that was to create installations and situate people within an experience, a lived photograph. Her more well-known photography and installation work includes “Salooni”, a collaboration on the politics of black women's hair, and “Penthouse” (2018) a room on a rooftop where Kampalan women could safely express their rage. Being one of the Nyege Nyege festival organizers brought Komukama into close proximity with the music scene. This gave her the courage to become a DJ which enabled her to explore a whole new medium. 

DJ Decay

Komukama, who called herself DJ Decay, would play at house parties and always enjoyed selecting the music, usually from YouTube, and while she wouldn't call that DJing, enough people enjoyed her selections, so she learned more technical skills so her sets became smoother. “Mostly people were just complaining... People were like, ‘Please, every time the song ends we have to stop dancing until the next one comes on’”
Being part of the Nyege Nyege team gave her access to studio space, controllers, and people eager to share their skills. Soon DJ Decay began appearing on more event posters and flyers throughout 2018 and became a crowd favorite. 
DJ Decay organizes her sets around her own love of dancing. She describes her earlier sets as random selections of songs that made her want to dance. Now they have developed into what  she describes as “organized chaos”. That organized chaos is her way of communicating, of creating a feeling, bringing listeners in and keeping them there for the duration of the set, which is what she accomplished during her “Boiler Room” set at the Nyege Nyege Festival. 

Cardi Monae

Nyege Nyege 2019 also introduced us to Cardi Monae, Decay's producer alias. The name is an homage to the different but equally influential female power that resonates from musicians Cardi B and Janelle Monae. Cardi Monae is a portal to experimentation, allowing the kind of time needed to experiment and create, that DJing can't provide for Decay. She's currently experimenting with creating musical scores, voice edits, and song edits. 
Cardi Monae may be a temporary alias, but she is one of many. Darlyne Komukama  has more aliases than projects to attach them to, an indicator that the general idea of having aliases is more important. To Komukama, names are a way of morphing.
“I always feel a little constrained by my form,” she said. “Since I can't change my face, or at least, I can't change it more than I do in the morning with makeup, I can change my name.” 

Time to Play 

Decay has multiple aliases and multiple art forms, but what she maintains in her music and before an audience are elements of fun and play. For her, it's all about novelty and joy.
When asked about her intentions when creating, she says, “It is always joyful. It's always community based. It's always experimental. I'm driven by novelty. I like to do things I've never done before.”
There are two sides to novelty in her perspective: one is that she gets bored easily and moves on to new things to stay interested, finding herself in a new creative field, and the other is that it encourages an endless pursuit of learning.
“You can't finish learning... I just go in as open as possible just to see what's going to happen, without any judgment; I'm not trying to make it great from the first pass.”

Pretty Things, Profound Experiences

Like her desire for novelty and joy, aesthetics is a crucial element to how Darlyne Komukama creates in whatever alias she is at the time. It's evident in her make-up, hair, nails, and clothing; it's reflected in her installations and photos. Even if the subject matter is serious, it is presented in a visually pleasing and exciting form. “I just like pretty things... and usually when I say pretty, people trivialize the word,” she said. “It's not like beauty which can be overwhelming and make you feel outside of it.”
And from pretty things come profound experiences, like the ability to stretch the boundaries of who you are or what you can do without the weight of other people's expectations. 

By Gloria Kiconco
Photos by Martin Kharumwa