It’s often said that “there’s no there anymore” on the Internet; Detroit and Hong Kong are now digitally entwined. While this may be good for human culture on any number of levels, it can feel as though electronic music and online beat culture are slowly morphing into one, somewhat monotonous, slow house sound. Yet there are still amazing eruptions of sonic innovation. Case in point: some of the most exciting new music to surface last year came from Sufyvn, who works as a dentist in a private clinic in Khartoum, Sudan, by day and makes beats by night. On his recent Ascension EP, the self-described “lone wolf” chopped up traditional Nubian Haqiba percussion and Sudanese jazz samples from old cassettes, then layered them with atmospheric synth work to weave a mesmerizing soundscape.

Growing up in Sudan, Sufyvn (government name Sufyan Ali) was steeped solely in the incredible diversity of Sudanese music, where hundreds of distinct languages and ethnicities collide. As a teenager, MTV was his only window to the outside. Then the Internet injected more hip-hop into his diet, and the distance between Khartoum and Detroit—hometown of Eminem, his initial rap influence—seemed to disappear. “I come from a hip-hop background. The reason I started making beats was to write raps on,” Sufyvn explains over Skype. But he began experimenting with electronic music after discovering Flying Lotus and other members of the Los Angeles beat scene, and though he finds the term Afrofuturist limiting, he openly acknowledges the impact of those so-called sounds on his work. His beats draw increasingly on the rattling percussion and complex time signatures of the Nubian villages from the north of Sudan, where his father’s family is from.

“I’m just trying to make music that is Sudanese, but also electronic,” he says. “It’s a really slow process. What I’m doing is kind of new; I don’t really have a reference at the back of my head.”

This approach is something of a break for northern African music as a whole. From Egypt to Morocco, pop music has been transformed by synthesizers and auto-tune, a syncretic process documented in some detail by Jace Clayton, aka DJ Rupture, in his book Uproot.