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Africaine 808: "Balla Balla" (via SoundCloud)

"It gets so complicated sometimes," Dirk Leyers says ruefully, tucked into a booth at a Berlin restaurant called White Trash while his 4-year-old daughter eats a hamburger beside him. "We fight over notes," agrees Hans Reuschl.

As the brain trust behind Africaine 808, the duo integrate dance music's electronics with a diverse range of rhythms and textures, resulting in a sound that’s unpredictable and funky in equal measure. But while their grooves seem effortless, the middle-aged musicians themselves are thornier creatures. With decades' worth of experience under their respective belts, both are deeply committed to their chosen aesthetic—and often just as deeply divided as to how they should attain it. An hour into our interview, it becomes painfully clear just how complicated things can get between the two: An argument about how to answer a question—soft-spoken Leyers wants to talk about dynamics, while the more emphatic Reuschl wants to focus on structure—builds to a series of back-and-forth taunts, eventually sending Leyers heading for the exit, daughter in tow. It looks, for a moment, like I may have witnessed the end of Africaine 808.

But Reuschl goes scurrying after his partner, and after a heads-bowed conversation, Leyers and his daughter return to the table with Reuschl, their partnership apparently intact. "He's a fucking whiny bitch!" teases Reuschl.

The tension is ironic, because the music they make together is so totally joyful. Basar, their recently released debut album, incorporates cosmic synthesizer fantasias, electro-soul balladry, New Orleans jazz, country blues, gospel, and a host of West African instruments and styles alongside elements of house, techno, and bass music. Reuschl calls it a kind of "global fusion," though he also cringes at the term. "When you say that, everybody thinks of this horrible world music stuff from the '80s," he says. Fortunately, there's no confusing Basar with dodgy white-dudes-with-didgeridoos records, in large part because it doesn't pretend to be anything it isn't. Expression and experimentation, rather than authenticity, are the point.

Throughout the album, on instrumental and vocal songs alike, the underlying message is that of music as an emancipatory force—and a unifying one. They're assisted by a number of collaborators, including the Congolese/German percussionist Dodo N'Kishi, who frequently plays with the duo's studio partners Mouse on Mars, and the Ghanian percussionist Eric Owusu, whom Reuchl encountered idly hand-drumming on a piece of plastic on a Munich bus.

Unlike many musicians within Berlin's house and techno culture, their sensibilities were formed elsewhere. Reuschl, who comes from Munich, once played drum 'n' bass on pirate radio, though his interest in African and Latin music and cosmic disco dates back to his adolescence, when he and his friends idolized Italian DJs like Beppe Loda and Daniele Baldelli. He also moonlights as a street artist; the illustration that adorns Basar's cover is his work, and a larger version of it can be found sprayed on an alley wall of Berlin's Arena complex, where he runs a small gallery.

Leyers, who hails from Cologne, used to be one-half of the Kompakt-signed techno duo Closer Musik alongside Matias Aguayo—another artist who, coincidentally, traded techno for a woolier kind of world fusion. Leyers and Reuschl met in Berlin around the turn of the millennium, but both musicians pine for the comparatively anarchic days of the 1990s. 

"Those were great times," says Reuschl, reminiscing about the days of setting up pirate-radio antennas on the roof. "You had all these illegal bars and clubs, where people would just squat a building and set something up: Monday Bar, Tuesday Bar, Wednesday Bar—they didn't even have names." The crowds then were more mixed, he says, and the music more varied—a single party might host not just house and techno but also jungle, hip-hop, and ragga. "Now everybody has to take drugs, and everything is swarming with tourists and based on making money, not on being creative. You go to clubs in Berlin and you hear the same music everywhere now. I'm not a nostalgic person; I can live with it. But when people talk about this amazing nightlife in Berlin, there was a time when it was a lot more thrilling than it is now." 

Africaine 808: "Ngoni" (via SoundCloud)

But Leyers and Reuschl are determined to keep fighting the good fight; their Vulkandance parties, which Reuschl began throwing in 2009, are a gleeful rebuke of techno homogeneity. Instead of the city's omnipresent oonce oonce, you'll hear a rich mixture of African, Latin, and tropical sounds along with all manner of leftfield disco. That musical melting pot was, in turn, the genesis for Africaine 808: It was in the process of making DJ-friendly edits of hard-to-mix tunes for those parties that the two musicians hit upon their unusual brand of fusion, leading to their debut single, "Cobijas," for their own Vulkan Dance label in 2013.

"We come from this punk rock, do-it-yourself attitude," says Reuschl. "We got inspired by guys like Lee Perry that had nothing. He would just take equipment and use it in the wrong way. That's the spirit of how we started, and that follows you your entire life."

Africaine 808: "Cobijas" (via SoundCloud)

But where their early singles remained resolutely focused on the dancefloor, Basar is a far more experimental record, one that reflects the vast range of their listening habits—and elegantly resists what they see as the rote functionalism plaguing contemporary dance music. At the same time, given the duo's gleefully omnivorous tendencies, they also resist any school of thought that would treat world music as a kind of museum piece. 

"Dirk and I have been collecting and exploring and playing for a long time, and we see the context," says Reuschl. "I don't want to compete with the people that made the original music. I'd rather do something that evolves out of what we both can put on the table and have people say that this isn't authentic African music—because it's not! It's a fucking 808! People get confused with our project name. We are not Africans, we just love African music."

Pitchfork: Africaine 808 grew out of your Vulkandance parties, how did those come about?

Hans Reuschl: It basically started as the result of me splitting with [fellow DJ and producer] Hunee. We did a lot of block parties, parties in flats, in leftfield clubs, garages—odd locations—playing disco, Afro, reggae, everything. It was great practice for both of us, because we would DJ back to back for six hours, and when you do that, you have to be flexible and go with the flow. There's no concept; you have to adapt. But when Hunee got more hooked up with the whole house and disco scene, I went more into what I favor: African music. I was like, Why not do a party where I just play that stuff? It was always an experiment; you never knew what would happen. It was a tremendous amount of work. I had to organize everything from scratch. At some point, two years ago, I started doing it in clubs. Now we're doing it at [Neukölln club] Sameheads, and it's going to stay there. This is the perfect place for it.

Dirk Leyers: It has this basement vibe. Very old-school.

Reuschl: Sweat dripping from the ceiling.

Leyers: With affordable drinks, not like this tourist rip-off. 

Reuschl: It's a family affair. The people who do parties are people I've known for 10 years from the underground cosmic disco scene.

Africaine 808: "Rhythm Is All You Can Dance 12" Mix" (via SoundCloud)

Pitchfork: I read that you saw the cosmic and Afro-disco DJ Beppe Loda play in the '80s?

Reuschl: Beppe was our hero. When I was a kid we would trade tapes, and the sound was all crackly and messed up, but it was like, "Hey! I got the new tape from Beppe!" Around '89 was when I got to see him, through a friend of mine in Munich who was into BMX. He brought me to the Alps to these rave parties. He collected African drums, and he gave me a drum and was like, "We're going to get in for free if we carry a drum, but we have to be drumming all night!"

We went in there, and there were like 40 guys in one corner, drumming to the music. It was this old-school setup, three decks, and [Daniele] Baldelli and DJ Mozart and Beppe were there DJing the most amazing music. On one record player there was always just percussion running, and on the other two decks they would do the regular mix. I was at techno parties before, where it was just fog and strobe. I was not so impressed by that. But that set had a whole spirit of connecting live instruments with electronic music, which brings us back to our project now.

Pitchfork: Your songs tend to develop very organically. What's the songwriting process like?

Reuschl: It's a hybrid way of working, because it's in between classic songwriting and modern dance music. What makes it a little bit different to a lot of dance productions is that we have a lot of different influences—jazz and country and folk music, this whole repetitive call-and-response thing, and the polyrhythms that overlap and create a different time frame. So you don't just have a 4/4. Sometimes it's about the threes, or it's about 3/8. Sometimes we have to fight with that.

Leyers: It's not based on mathematics. It's based on feeling.

Reuschl: It's not one formula. What makes our project different to a lot of these retro African music projects, where producers go to a certain area or country and just extract a style of music, is that we get inspired by a rhythmic structure from one culture and then play a completely different set of music or harmonies on top of that. It's never a linear idea of just, "Let's do a kuduro track," or "Let's do a samba." Where you can see it is "Cosmicumbia": It's a classic cumbia beat but the super spacey, echoey guitars and synths are completely unusual. It's a modern approach of getting a global concept going, instead of just exploiting one certain style of music or one particular sound and reproducing it.

Pitchfork: You started out making DJ edits of hard-to-DJ music, and now you've made an album that's not really meant for DJs.

Reuschl: It depends on the DJ. I respect DJs who are not just looking for tools. I love storytelling and structure. I love when there are phases of building and falling down, and even making mistakes and correcting them. It shows the human aspect—which is exactly the opposite of this dead, sequenced, perfectionalized music. Humans are perfect in the sense of being imperfect, random, not able to draw a straight line. We pretend in our modern world that we need to be perfect but we function best when we're thrown into chaos.