Chris Hamiwest--a.k.a. Agatchu--is rising fast in the world of global African music. He's a versatile beat-maker and a smooth vocalist whose songs are making waves with fans and critics alike. His current track, "Maradona," produced with AZNVR, has clocked over 660,000 YouTube hits in its first month. Afropop's Banning Eyre reached Agatchu just before a Trace TV event in Paris, where the artist lives to hear his story. It's a story with global reach, reflecting Agatchu's Angolan, Congolese and Nigerian background, quite the triple threat! Here's their conversation.

All photos by Jeremy Baudet.

Well, I started music when I was 15 as a producer. That was mainly in Angola. My parents are Angolan. My mother is Angolan-Congolese. And my father is in Angolan-Nigerian. So I kind of have mixed cultures. I always tried to get something from each of those cultures since I was very young. Growing up, I was listening to a lot of house music, kuduro, kizomba, samba... This is like my main core from my environment where I grew up. Then came the South African influence, with kwaito and SA House music. I surfed that wave. But as a producer, I started connecting myself a lot more with my family on the Congolese side and the Nigerian side. I always had this influence of highlife and Congolese rumba. So starting as a producer got me to really learn the ABCs of all these genres. That's how I can connect myself being a modern Nigerian-Congolese artist.

Very powerful. Nigerian especially is very huge. Congo and Angola are very connected. I would say they're 80 % same culture. From the north side of Angola to the Congo is basically the same culture.

I grew up in Luanda. I moved around as well. My mother was a reseller. She would buy merchandise from China and all over the world. Sometimes she would move with me. That was also good experience growing up. My father was in a mining company. He was passionate about mining, precious stones, diamonds, also oil. He's always done that. But nobody in my family is really into music.

I would say it was the environment. Growing up, I would imitate voices a lot, artists' voices. I would try to imitate Lil Wayne's voice, 50 Cent's voice, and I was good at that. I started doing freestyles when I was 14. One of my childhood best friends considered himself a rapper, so he was always having those baggy clothes and coming by my place. We would freestyle on every instrumental that we would download through the internet. I kind of fell in love with that. And I started also downloading a lot of beats. "Bro, did you hear this? This is Polo da Don's beat. Let's try to do something." I kind of got the taste of that until one day I decided why not try to produce my own beats?

I ended up seeing a video on YouTube, a tutorial video of somebody making beats with Apache Airflow. And I was like, "Okay, so this is how instrumentals are made." I always had this image of beats being made through analog instruments. So if you want to make music, you have to know all these instruments, like to play guitar and all that. But seeing this Airflow Studio tutorial, I was like, "Wow, so it's really possible. I can just have an app on my PC and start producing music." But it wasn't really professional. I was like: no, this is not music; this is just an app. I didn't know I could get far with that, and that I could improve myself. But it was just a matter of time and investment.

I started with Airflow Studio 3 because in Angola the internet coverage wasn't really powerful. People didn't have access to the internet. So we would go to cyber café to email or download music, or to upload music on our phones. One of the workers at the cyber cafe, told me, "Look, if you want to start, go with the first version so you can understand the whole process of the software. And then after you master it, you can download the last version."

Fifteen. When I turned 15, my stepmother gave me a new laptop. Then I was using was FL Studio and Photoshop. Every time.

It's a play on words. My real name is Chris Hamiwest. Back then, I used to download a lot of beats through SoundClick. SoundClick was a platform for a lot of producers. It's not popular anymore. But there was this producer who really influenced my production style, Johnny Juliano. His tag was so long, I was like, "Wow, I wanna have a tag very long." First, I thought of, I got you. Like, I got the beat, I got the vibes. If you want the beat, I got you.

My Angolan friends didn't really speak English, but they understood "I got you," and they started calling me Agatchu. I was like, yo, that's pretty original. Agatchu.

Wow. You are a legend.

It's the environment I grew up in. As a kid, I was getting it from my parents: a lot of reggae and Congolese songs. But after learning how to speak proper English and getting the influence from the U.S. hip-hop community... That's when I really got into hip-hop and R&B. I just mixed everything.

I started producing for myself. I didn't imagine having the level, the quality, to produce for an artist. When I listened to my productions, I was like, "Why doesn't it sound like Timbaland's beat? Why doesn't it sound like Polo da Don's beat?" There was something wrong. How do they do it? Should I learn how play an instrument? Guitar? I was always locked in my room, playing instrumentals and trying to freestyle and recording myself on my PC. One day, one of my cousin's friends--he's like my big brother--heard an instrumental I was playing. He said, "Play me what you're recording." He heard it and he was like, "Yo, that's good. This is dope. I need to introduce it to one of my friends. He's an Angolan artist. I'll introduce you to Sonny. He's my neighbor, a good R&B artist. I think he would love this."

So I sent it to him, and kind of forgot about it. After three weeks, he came back to my place, and was like, "Yo, Sonny wants to meet you. He loved what he heard." I called Sonny, and he was like, "I love your beats, man. Your sound is different. I would like to use this for my album." I went to his place. I was still young. I went there with my PC, my headphones. I was playing beats. And he was just looking at me like, "Yo, this kid is so passionate. Who do you listen to?" I told him Kanye West, Timbaland, Polo da Don..." He was like, "Yo, that's a good school you're into. Keep it up." So then, he used three of my instrumentals on his album. I was like, "Okay, this is the sound. Top artists in my country are approving it. It means I'm getting there."

I was 16.

Now I'm 28.

Yeah, I started teaching myself how to play keys, just basic knowledge of chords and progressions. I taught myself. And yeah, sometimes I would play guitar, but mostly keyboard.

Thank you. Yeah, that's a very interesting question. It was a lot of practice because I wasn't very confident about my singing. I always had this principle that what I produce is for me first, before I give it to an artist. I would always try to drop vocals on it. Either I would rap or just sing to it. And when I arrived in France during my high school years, I was making music every day. I ended up at one of these high schools that had a lot of musicians. I would just see them running around the hall with their instruments. I was like, "Yo, this guy is playing guitar. I should ask him to lay some guitar on my beat." So I started hanging around them. They would play sounds I would record on my phone and then sample it.

The principal of the high school heard of me. "There's Chris and he's really into music." He created a group of musicians and we would record instrumentals for him. He thought it would be interesting to create an activity for musicians so that we could influence other high school kids. So this led to them financing a recording studio inside the high school.

Near Paris. Not very far. That's where I finished my high school. So every day I would go to the studio. I even had the keys. So this really helped me throughout those years to record myself and learn and learn and learn and learn. That's when I started feeling the influence of reggae and rumba and house music, the highlife that I had from back home, also a lot of R&B and hip-hop artists like Kanye West and Drake.

I didn't think I was a super vocalist because I don't have a big vocal range. I just needed to manage to get my tone sharp. If I can get my tone sharp, sounding like Ryan Leslie, because back in the days I used to watch a lot of Ryan Leslie, the producer and singer. So getting that Ryan Leslie vibe and how he used to sing, the harmonies, the way he did his background vocals, I was like, "Okay, I can do that as well."

I would do instrumentals and lay hooks on it, or maybe ad libs for artists, for rappers to inspire them. This helped me to connect with artists a lot. I would send them songs with demo vocals. I would say, "Look, this is the beat. I tried something on it. Maybe it can inspire you." And they'd be like, "Yo, I didn't really feel the beat, but with your vocals on it, that's very good. I like the vocals." One time, I sent a demo song to an Angolan friend, a rapper. I told him, "Look, don't use my vocals because my recording is not really pro. You can just re-record it." He was like, "Nah, I like the way you did it. Your delivery is different." That was like the best compliment I ever got. He was like, "Can I use your vocals? I'll put you on the credits. In one year or two, I know you'll start singing, man, because for me, you're a singer as well." Today, he's one of my best friends. His name is Rafix. He's an Angolan rapper. He's like my brother today. Every song I do, he hears it first.

That was just pure passion. I was doing it with no thought that I might make it professionally one day. But I always aimed to get my sound unique and sounding very pro. And then I realized I needed to work with top artists from where I grew up in Angola, and in Congo as well. And after that, I started working with a lot of brothers from Nigeria as well.

Exactly. This is happening in Paris. I learned the internet game a lot. I taught myself how to contact artists and link up with people and collaborate with producers and try to network.

Yeah, yeah. Because there was proper internet, and I had ways of getting more financing, more instruments and a proper PC. I could have that comfort to make good sounds.

Yeah. I was playing football when I was in high school, and I always dreamed I was going to be a professional football player. Every day, practicing, going to train two times a day at the gym. I would do eight hours, 12 hours of sports per week. But at the same time, when I was not on the pitch, I would be at home just practicing music or in school. I wouldn't even watch TV. I would just be on my PC, producing, producing. That turned into an obsession for me. I would have school exams on the same day, but two hours before, I'll be bouncing an instrumental.

I was playing for a football club here in France. There were different levels, and the club was like fifth division. There were players that were getting paid already. Some players would get paid 3k, 2k, and others, upcoming players, they would get paid maybe between 800 and 1.5k euros. Me, I wasn't getting paid yet. I didn't have a contract. But just me grinding and hustling my beats throughout the internet, I would make the same amount as those players. And at one point I was like, "What am I doing?" When I turned 19, I realized, "Okay, I really love football and I'm very good at it. But I didn't network properly." Sports industry is like music industry. It requires networking. It's not about being the best, or the best of the best. It's about smart networking, having an agent or somebody that's linked to somebody who can connect you with the club. I started having those connections in music. But football, I didn't have that network, because I didn't know how it worked. My parents would support me, encourage me in everything I would do. But they weren't there to really follow up my professional football career. I didn't have this knowledge of networking. But music? I did it naturally. And when I realized that I had to have the same hunger with football, it was kind of late.

PayPal. I love PayPal. I would upload my beats on SoundClick and just reshare them on Facebook. And on Facebook, yeah, people will listen to it and they will download it. And some artists would reach out to me, they'd be like, "Yo, can I use this beat?" I'd be like, "Yeah, you can buy it." And they would pay for it, a license fee, 500 bucks, 800 bucks. I woke up one day and just checking my emails I saw that I had $250 on my PayPal. I was like, "Wow, where did this come from?" I opened it, and I saw that somebody bought one of my beats on SoundClick. SoundClick was very powerful. A lot of producers, Sonny Digital, Metro Boomin, they came from SoundClick. They still have their accounts over there with their old beats.

So this is when I realized, if I multiply my chances in my territory, I can make maybe 10 times more. Why not 20 times more? Let me upload more beats and place them everywhere and start sharing them on Facebook and tell people, "You can buy this for 250, 500, 800." That's when I really started making a lot of cash.

Yeah, yeah, there was a moment. A DJ friend would use my beats for transitioning between songs when he'll be playing in clubs. He would play kizomba, samba, all that Afro music. He'd be like, "Yeah, you can come here. I think you'll like the vibe." And when I went there, he surprised me. He played one of my demo songs that I had sent to the group. I was just behind him on the deck. And suddenly, one of the organizers of the event, he came to check in, and he was like, "Bro, what's this song you're playing? Like, I'm trying to Shazam the song, but I cannot find it." And he was like, "Yo, this is my guy singing here." And I was like, "No, no, no. No, that's not me." Because I thought he would say the song is weak.

So this is a DJ friend of mine--his name is Wilson. He's a super, super French producer. He said, "I need you to create some melodies on a beat I did for a Cape Verdean artist, Nelson Freitas. Can you do it?" I was like, "Yeah, yeah, straight up. But today?" And he was like, "Yeah, after the club we'll go, at like 6 a.m. My studio's just like 500 meters away. We'll just go there and record."

So we went there and he just put the mic on. He set up the vocal channel, put the beat and I just recorded everything in one shot. He's like, "Bro, that's super dope. When did you write this?" I'm like, "Nah, I didn't write it. I'm just freestyling."

"Like, for real? You just did that now?"

"Yeah, I just freestyle. This is what I do every day."

He was like, "This guy is really freestyling. That's dope. A lot of artists I work with couldn't do this in one shot. This is incredible for me, seeing a young guy like you doing this. You're feeling it like it's nothing. This is pure talent." From there, I started moving left and right with Wilson. He would invite me to sessions, take me places. Boom, boom, boom, boom. And my network got bigger. I realized that proper networking had led me to here. Patience, hard work, and just repeating the same thing over and over again and mastering what I'm doing got me here. So I just have to keep pushing. That's when I realized: Okay, I'm not a producer; I'm a songwriter. I can sing as well. Okay, that's dope.

I think it was the song that my friend Rafix used, the hook that I did. I was in France, but he told me that song was a smash hit in Angola.

That's the first time. It was an amazing experience. Amazing team I worked with. We did everything from scratch. I have songs on this EP that I did four or five years ago. I just renewed them. I had this in me. I wanted to release songs, but since I had a lack of finance and I was always aiming big, I wanted to have music video, proper mixing... I would contact engineers, top French engineers, and they would be like, "Yo, to mix and master a song, 800 euros." I would be like: Whoa, I need 800 euros for the same person who's mixing Maitre Gims's song. So for me to have that quality, I need to have 800 euros.

So I started collaborating with producers, collaborating with engineers. My demo songs were playing all over the studios and one ended up in my project manager's hands, he was like, "I love this Nigerian artist. He's from here in Paris." We got on the phone. He was like, "Bro, I love the song you did." And the song was "Believe," with Teni.

It was natural. I was scheduled to direct a session and produce for Teni and Joé Dwèt Filé. Joé Dwèt arrived an hour and half late because he had an interview before or something he had to do. Joé is good friend of mine too. He told me, "Chris, handle the sessions, start producing something and keep Teni busy so that when I arrive, I just kick it from there."

So Teni, when she arrived, she checked me out. I was like, "Yeah, I'm part of Nigeria as well." "Sweet. Let's make music. What are you playing right now?" I played her first the instrumental and she was like, "Yo, this is sweet. Can I record something on that?" She went inside the booth and recorded one shot. I was amazed because she's very cool and super talented. "Wow, you just freestyled that right now?" I can do that as well, but the way she did it? She didn't even mumble a word. She did it from beginning to end properly, every sentence correct.

She was like, "You want me to go again?" I said, "Yeah, go again." I told her to talk about this relationship between a dude and a woman. They're going through this and that, and she went in and she did it in one shot: the first verse, the intro, the hook, the bridge, everything. She came out of the booth and she was looking at me like, "I'm no joke. I don't joke.

You have to believe in yourself before others believe in you. I had heard a sample, a vocal from an influencer from Nigeria, Portable. Super cool dude. Very down to earth. I met him in Paris and sometimes he would take his phone and just sing and talk about a lot of things. He did a vocal I used in the beginning of "Believe." He said something like, "Enjoy yourself by yourself. Believe in yourself." I'm like, "Bro, let's sample this. Let's make a song with this." The same night, we went back home after the session. I think it was like 4 AM. Me and my brother, we were like, "OK, let's start producing." I said, OK, the hook is going to be, "Enjoy yourself by yourself. Believe in yourself. Fight for yourself. Let's take it. Let's do the harmonies." And that's the main subject of the song. Like, yeah, you have to enjoy yourself by yourself first.

Mmm, exactly that. You're not. Because Portable does a lot of Fuji vocals in his Afrobeats. And the freestyle he did was mainly Fuji, the way he sang.

Teni did her verse in one shot. The same thing. When Joé Filé arrived one hour and a half late, Teni was like, "Let's start working." The vibe was already flowing.

"New Maserati" is a song I had a while ago, like five years ago. I wanted to paint the idea of making it in a society through music. Having a Maserati today... It's a very, very, very good brand of car. You don't see it everywhere. And I was like, "Okay, I will go hard every day. I will keep on pushing every day until I buy myself a new Maserati. And this is the quote from the song: "I'll go out every day. I'll fight every day. I'll pray every day and sing every day until I'll be able to pull up in a new Maserati." It's a song of hope and motivation, just to get you energetic and out there and fighting for yourself. I relate to that a lot, and for me it was very important to have it out there as a first single.

Oh yeah, "Bekanise." I would be inventing a lot of things in the studio, you know. I was at a session with my friend. I was kind of busy going out of the studio, coming in. I was on the phone and he started to beat. And one of our close friends came in. His name is Beka and he was very inspiring. So I would just play with his name and call it and say, you were our "backer," like you were behind us. And I was freestyling on it. "I'm behind everything. I'm a Bekaniser." And my friend was like, "Bro, this is it. It has to be called Bekanise." It's like we baptized the beat.

I just catch every vibe, the vibes from the environment. I can listen to a sample on Instagram and boom, I'll chop it. I can be in a conversation with you right now and after I just brainstorm and be like, yeah, Banning told me about this. Why not make a song about that? I'll call that song, "Banning Me." I won't let you know, you'll just see it out there. I'm out there. I'm pushing hard every day now. Everybody's Banning me. Everybody's Banning me.

Yeah. I speak English, French, Portuguese, and I speak also Congolese, Lingala. Some Yoruba. I'm not fluent like that, but I understand a lot. And Spanish as well. I handle Spanish well too. I think it's the fact that I traveled a lot with my parents when I was young. That just helped to open my brain a little bit, and I was easy with languages.

Maradona is a special song. Compared to the other songs I've released, it has a low tempo that evokes Maradona. Maradona is a legend. Being "outside like Maradona" is a term used in Nigeria. It means you're a player. I'm outside every day like a player. It's a punchline. So the song "Maradona"... Okay, it's about male telling a female that I just want to be outside, have fun, and appreciate every moment of life. We don't need to go into this trouble, and you don't need to worry about the finances I spend. Let's have some fun tonight. Don't stress. I just want to go out there and enjoy life with you. This is what I'm talking about in "Maradona," because she wants me to handle my finances better, and she doesn't want me to be spending a lot. But for this one night, I'm telling her, I don't want to be inside. I just want to be there outside and enjoy life like Maradona. If today I don't have the foreign currencies, there's no problem. I cannot have it in naira, but tomorrow I have it in dollars. I cannot have it in dollars, but tomorrow I have it in euros. It's motivational at the same time. It's also me telling a female to not worry about tomorrow. Sometimes it's good to disconnect and just appreciate life.

I let it flow. For example, the Maradona song... I was in Portugal with a friend of mine who is a dope singer. He gave me the idea for Maradona, like, "Bro, I think I have this idea of a song that I feel like you would fit in." I'm like, "Okay, I'm recording a music video right now with Ya Levis." It was the "One for Me" music video. So I was like, "Explain it to me. I think I'll stay for two more days in Portugal and I can just record it here." Okay, boom. He sent me the beat and I reproduced it with my partner AZNVR, and I recorded the song in Portugal. We made a music video just after that. In two days. So I don't really aim specifically to get a specific sound out there. I don't want to be in a box of what's working and what's not. I just want people to discover me and all my universes. Like, "Okay, Agatchu. He's doing Afro R &B, Afro-house. And he's also doing French urban type beats, kompa, zouk." This is just me feeling the vibe and getting it out there.

Anything is possible. I was talking to my fellow producer friend AZNVR yesterday, and he was like, "We need to try to find old sounds and mix in with Afrobeats." He starts talking about this legendary blues player/guitarist. He said, he sold his soul to the devil to play guitar like that.

Robert Johnson.

Robert Johnson, thank you. And he was playing me Robert Johnson songs, and he's like, "Do you think we can sample something? Let's work on this." I was like, "Yeah, this is hard work. This is in three. But if we get the right drums to it, it's gonna bang." We haven't yet scheduled a session for it. And now you're telling me this, I think we have a Banning song already.

Oh yeah. You gotta put it in 12/8 or 6/8.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll do it. Thank you for the suggestion as well. I always appreciate learning, especially from OGs, I would say, like you.

No one has ever called me that before.

I know you have a very big library when it comes to music.

That's for sure. At least 20,000 CDs in the house, not to mention vinyl and cassettes.

One day we'll have a chance to sit down and just talk and talk and talk about music.

It's a deal. Stay in touch, Agatchu, and good luck with everything.