Dawuna Wants to Flatten Time On New True Panther Album ‘Love’s Arp’

There’s a surprisingly outgoing energy to Ian Mugerwa when I meet him in Baltimore’s historic Northeast Market on a balmy Tuesday morning in October. Public information on the singer-producer is limited, and his dark-hued Instagram account matches the deep, intimate domains his R&B music as Dawuna lurks in. So it was to my surprise when he greeted me with a charmingly awkward handshake and led me to his favorite Peruvian food stand to chat it up with the man working at the cash register, whom he seemed acquainted with. I was taken aback by his outgoing spirit, and couldn’t help but stumble over my words when he began asking me about my life before I could find a proper way to officially start the interview.

The 30-year-old had a good reason to wake up in jolly spirits. Love’s Arp, his newest album, is set to release in November through True Panther, which he mentions as his “dream label since ‘17.” He sees the release as a curveball to a plateau that followed from riding out his 2020 breakout album Glass Lit Dreams, an exploratory ASMR-meets-soul experiment hailed as a game-changer in today’s oversaturated digital climate. He’s had a few nightmare label situations, the most obscure one being the time he collaborated with an Irish hip-hop label that had to create an entirely new imprint to release his music (they didn’t follow through). After doing it independently for a while, he’s thrilled to finally have a team to help him with the backbreaking work.

But it would be remiss not to acknowledge the desperation of what he calls “a Danny Brown situation,” the need for positive industry infrastructure to support himself and, eventually, get out of a city he has a complicated relationship with. We only walk around his quaint hood—a quiet maze of stuffy mix-match rowhomes—for a handful of minutes before the city’s suffering makes itself apparent: blighted, shuttered stores backdrop members of the Black working class trying to earn their next meal. Mugerwa makes it his mission to speak to everyone we pass, either offering a helping hand or wishing blessed days. The interview gets paused to buy a woman a meal. He reminds me of János, a character from László Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance—visibly burdened by the daily pains of the city, yet emitting a head-in-the-stars radiation for his community to grasp onto in times of need.

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Photo by Gustavo Marinho

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Still, Mugerwa would choose this over the claustrophobic suburbs, where he grew up with his immigrant Ugandan father and Bay Stater mother. His dad was a kid genius who was one out of ten kids in Uganda to score high enough on a math exam for a full scholarship to an engineering school in China. It was there that he met Ian’s mom (“Found like the fifth white person he had seen, and was like, ‘I want that one’”) before the two eventually moved to Kenya and had Ian. Al-Qaeda bombed the office his mother worked at as a diplomat, and the family eventually relocated to Northern Virginia.

Mugerwa remembers Fairfax County as racist and classist, with a predominantly white, well-off background. His education was strict in a WASPy way, a diet of tough academics, travel soccer, and rigorous cello training that put his playing level on par with that of college students at only 13 years old. “The academic environment and pressure were so intense,” he tells me. “Eight kids in my high school killed themselves in the four years that I went there. I was one of seven kids [in my graduating class] that didn’t go to college.”

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It wasn’t until Mugerwa left for Richmond at 19 that the creative itch in his brain finally got a good scratching. Virginia Commonwealth University, or VCU, became the stomping grounds that would help develop his early music as Ot to, not to, and set the foundation for Dawuna. During the day, he would sleep on the floor of a friend’s apartment; at night, he’d sneak into the music practice rooms, often recording until four in the morning. He had also obtained a newfound self-confidence in his Black identity: “I was suddenly being told, ‘You’re cute,’ and I’m like, 'What are you talking about? I’m cute? I don’t have weird big lips and a big nose and my skin doesn’t look like diarrhea?”’ The singer-producer speaks of these days with high regard—even if he had to steal groceries from an undisclosed supermarket. Early release These Movements I & II folds his signature nasally vocal runs behind sparse cello playing, a set of intriguing studies in R&B and modern classical music that inspired him (he mentions Penderecki, Górecki, and, of course, D’Angelo). It’s this sound that has been carefully chiseled over the years, each Mugerwa project akin to a chemical reaction in which he decides how much of these disparate elements to dilute in the solution.

When his VCU homies graduated and he “maxed out” Richmond, New York City felt like the natural next step. Saying that moving there was “the best decision ever,” he spent nights working at an ice cream shop, days working on Glass Lit Dreams, and free time “doing the Bossa Nova, Mood Ring hustle. I was seeing white people be fascinated with club music from Black people. So I said, ‘let me take that and put it into R&B,’” he tells me with a grin on his face. His eventual move to Baltimore in 2023 came after he developed health issues that required his brother’s caretaking, and he doesn’t hesitate to tell me he’d rather be back in New York City.

Since his early releases were made at VCU and Glass Lit Dreams was made during his stint in New York City, it felt natural to ask how Mugerwa was processing Baltimore as a place of inspiration. He was reluctant to give the city credit for real impact, noting its lack of thriving social scenes. “People here are very anti-social,” he glumly relays to me on the front porch of his apartment. “The art is very second-city. Moving to any city is lonely, but moving here especially, people don’t want to be receptive to you trying to get into their communities.”

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Photo by Gustavo Marinho

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It was this isolation that led him to make Love’s Arp, which is largely about his girlfriend, who he currently lives with. “Real talk, my girlfriend was supporting the fuck out of both of us, financially. She didn’t want a roommate, so we had an extra bedroom, and I was able to build a whole studio and lock in there. Be isolated and just be with her. Every song, I’m going to her like, ‘Listen to this, what do you think?’ I was kind of forced to move here by [health] circumstances. But I fell in love with an amazing woman that inspired a whole work that I look at as my best work at this point.” Listening to him speak with wide eyes about how his partner changed his life for the better evokes the Love Jones, singing-from-the-street type intimacy of Love’s Arp. On “Love Jaunt,” he puts it plainly: “I don’t have the strength to continue without you.”

Love’s Arp is the closest to “true R&B” Mugerwa has unearthed: his vocals front and center, the hooks stickier, the beats more straightforward than before. For him, the back-to-basics form of the record is a flex: “A lot of these niggas [in experimental music] can’t write songs.” You can still hear the tension trying to resolve in these songs, though. Lead single “Love’s Ekongo” shows groovy polyrhythms stumbling and tripping over one another with varying textural heft, only possible from a musique-concrète savant concerned with things like space and immersion. The drum rolls on “Love Wants a Family” sound less like a session musician or drum machine and more like a natural field recording of nebulous movement miraculously catching a pocket. “Be Careful II” has a Bootsy Collins-esque funk to it, but the thick driving synths give everything a plasticky DAW feel. If we were to take the D’Angelo comparison to its fullest logical conclusion, Love’s Arp seeks to establish Dawuna as an heir to the bygone self-producing R&B maestros of the ‘90s who revived the Black music of the past by juicing it with a carnivorous two-hands-on-everything work ethic.

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“The primary goal is to continue the diasporic Black musical tradition,” he tells me dead seriously, as we sit on a bench in Patterson Park. Dawuna approaches this goal by playing with temporality: he sees his efforts as fitting in “a new wave of flattening time,” a way to get at a fresh Black sensibility by fusing personal experiences with decades-long traditions. This compulsion began when he traveled to visit family in his dad’s village in Uganda back in 2024. “I went back there and interviewed a lot of the elders and recorded these conversations and got history and all these things that I needed that my dad wasn’t able to provide. Even the name Dawuna. I was taught by one of the elders, sitting under a mango tree. One of them was like, ‘Do you know who that was?’ and my dad was embarrassed. He was like, ‘....no.’ [The elder] was like, ‘Man, that’s yo name and yo son’s name!’ Dawuna was a warrior who was enslaved by another African kingdom. He fought his way to freedom. I started getting into the music, the rhythms, the drumming… I realized I needed to fuse that into the album.” He has hopes to eventually build collaborative relationships with musicians working back in Uganda.

To want to make “Black diasporic music” can inherently be an ambitious and daunting task—what does that even mean? For Dawuna, it’s these constant attempts to strike a personal truth that situates him in a racialized world that can’t always make sense. This kind of refraction is what makes his music so special to me. When I hear Dawuna, I hear the ubiquitous Motown love songs that could’ve been written by a team of 20, but I also hear the journal-like writings of W.E.B. DuBois that draw collective meaning from quotidian experiences. I hear unexplored worlds being shaped at the edges of violence; new reconfigurations of Black love being offered through audial autofiction. It comes down to something simple, he tells me towards the end of our conversation: “I just want to make music for my people.”

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Photo by Gustavo Marinho

Photo by Gusatvo Marinho

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