As if searching out exotic new thrills, western rock bands have trained their sights on Africa. New York’s Vampire Weekend spearheaded the trend last year with their clever grafting of preppie indie-rock and Afrobeat, creating what they dryly described as “Upper West Side Soweto”. Acts ranging from Franz Ferdinand to Mika have followed suit, dropping African polyrhythms and guitar motifs into their songs with a cheerful disregard for authenticity.

The music of BLK JKS features ‘mazy guitars, polyglot lyrics and sudden propulsive lifts in tempo’

The west has a long history of interest in African music. But western music has also taken root in Africa, from Ethiopian jazz to Nigerian funk. Now two new additions to the musical traffic find African musicians mixing up western and African pop. Warm Heart of Africa by the band The Very Best fuses dance music and Malawian vocals: Vampire Weekend’s singer Ezra Koenig guests on one track. And further to the south of the continent, BLK JKS’ After Robots finds black South Africans from Johannesburg playing dense art-rock in the style of New Yorkers or Londoners.

The Very Best are a trio comprising the Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and the Franco-Swedish DJ duo Johan Karlberg and Etienne Tron, who go by the curious name Radioclit. Warm Heart of Africa unites Mwamwaya’s flowing chants, sung in Malawi’s national language Chichewa, with Karlberg and Tron’s electronic beats, which range freely between electropop, Afrobeat and rock.

The two Europeans were drawn to African music via US hip-hop, which led to an interest in “ghetto music cultures from all over the world,” Karlberg says. In recent years, paralleling the likes of Vampire Weekend discovering Afropop, a western vogue has sprung up for developing nation dance music such as “kwaito” (South African house) and “kuduro” (Angolan techno). Cultural tourism is spiced with genuine musical curiosity. “You keep looking for new things and sooner or later you find yourself back in Africa because a lot of music originated from there. You might even say that the drumbeat comes from there,” Karlberg says.

The Very Best formed in London in 2006 when one of the DJs bought a bicycle in Mwamwaya’s junk shop. On learning the Malawian émigré was a drummer, they invited him to jam with them in Karlberg’s studio, imagining him to be an African percussionist. Instead, Mwamwaya turned out to be, in his words, “a normal drummer” – albeit one possessing an unusually good voice.

Mwamwaya is now back living in Malawi after nine years in London. Before emigrating, the 34-year-old drummed with one of the country’s most popular bands, Masaka, playing traditional music and western covers. Warm Heart of Africa hasn’t been distributed in his native land. Malawi is one of the least developed countries in Africa, and while rap, R&B and reggae are popular there, there is no market for The Very Best’s brand of cosmopolitan dance music.

Yoking together music from the first and third worlds can be a fraught business, thick with accusations of voyeurism and exploitation. Paul Simon’s Graceland stands at the pinnacle of western and African pop collaborations, but when the American singer made it in South Africa in 1985 he was criticised in the west for supposedly not paying local musicians enough (an unfair claim) and breaking the embargo against apartheid (a more complicated accusation).

Mwamwaya believes times have changed. “If you talk about 20 years ago, it was quite hard for an African to go to western countries and make music like I did,” he says. “But now it’s possible. I think it’s because of technology too, which is making everything easier as well. People in the west can do African-influenced music even without coming to Africa.”

It is, he concludes, a “sign that the world is coming together more and more”. But there is a limit to the musical melting-pot. “You can hardly find a Malawian into rock music,” he concedes.

BLK JKS – pronounced “black jacks” – may change that. They are a black South African rock band who formed in Johannesburg in 2000, but have only just released their debut album, After Robots. It was recorded in the US after they were discovered by the American producer Diplo (whose collaborator, the Anglo-Sri Lankan rapper MIA, turns up as a guest vocalist on The Very Best’s album).

The quartet have been lauded as “an African TV on the Radio” for their intense, proggy style, though, like musicians the world over, they profess disdain for labels. “Money-rock,” someone pipes up in the background when the FT invites guitarist Mpumi Mcata to characterise their sound. It’s morning time in New York. Mcata, in true rock-and-roll fashion, hasn’t slept since playing a concert upstate the night before.

Rock, which the 26-year-old pronounces with a handsome rolling “r”, may have roots in African-American music, and boast black heroes such as Jimi Hendrix, but its audience has traditionally been white. South Africa has a rock tradition encompassing both black and white performers – Mcata cites the white singer Johnny Clegg and the black jazz-rock group Malombo – but apartheid emphasised the music’s racial divisions.

“The idea that rock was a white people’s thing became even more of a thicker line. [For black rock bands] it was like, oh these guys are playing the enemy’s music. But by the time we came around, people were prepared to take that back.”

The band members, who speak four different languages, grew up in the post-apartheid 1990s watching alt-rock music videos like teenagers throughout the west. “Western media is very good at getting out there, to all parts of the world, third world countries included, though I’m not sure if Johannesburg is a third world city any more,” says Mcata.

BLK JKS’ mazy guitars, polyglot lyrics and sudden propulsive lifts in tempo evoke the excitement of life in a city that has emerged, in Mcata’s description, as “the New York of South Africa”. Rock music has proved as natural a form of expression for him and his bandmates as it is for a band in New York to borrow the sounds of Afropop. “It’s the world we live in. Hopefully the novelty can wear off and we can listen to what is actually happening.”

The Very Best’s ‘Warm Heart of Africa’ is out on Moshi Moshi Records. BLK JKS ‘After Robots’ is out on Secretly Canadian. They begin a UK tour on October 29 at Hoxton Bar & Kitchen in London. blkjks.wordpress.com