You’ll hear it as you bump along the road into Zebilla, a vibrant town in the remote Upper East Region of northern Ghana. The sound of palms striking palms: rhythmic. Complex. Communal. You might hear laughter, and harmonised chanting. On arrival, you may even spot Ghanaian star Lamisi, singing and dancing in a circle of women, all of them clapping. And clapping. And clapping.

“I’ve been visiting my relatives in northern Ghana since I was small,” says Lamisi, who is based in Accra, the country’s capital, a 15-hour bus ride south, and whose Lamisi Fata Foundation is dedicated to empowering girls here in this vast tranche of West Africa with its unique customs, different ethnic groups and grassy savannah landscapes. And indeed, its drastically patriarchal society.

“The women of Zebilla have been teaching me the clapping rhythms that are the basis of so much of their music and dance,” she continues. “Wanlov and I decided to create a project that would combine this ancient artform with traditional acoustic instrumentation and the synthesised vocals that have been popular across Ghana for decades.”

Put your hands together, then, for Let Us Clap, an album whose nine tracks flip the script on notions of ‘traditional’ music, finding gold in the intersection between ancient organic grooves and studio-generated electronics, and aeons-old clapping patterns and heavily vocoded vocals. Throughout, tempos push and pull. Tension builds and releases. Tomorrow is in dialogue with the past.

Let Us Clap is not so much Afrofuturism — a phrase too often bandied about these days — as African futurism: a snapshot of the future of African music. Two traditions — raw and acoustic, digital and processed — woven into a textured, otherworldly whole.