Abel Salauchwe

Hymns of Bantu is actually about universalities. It's a celebration of our ancestors when you look back and seeing how they used to govern themselves and celebrating that in musical and sonic form. The music is a hugely eclectic tapestry of sounds. The combination is of many different cultures.

And then we go over to much more improvised music. There's a piece on the album called Dinaka, which is improvised on African percussion, throat singing, and even prepared piano, where we put, you know, blue tack inside the piano to make different sounds.

Pre-colonial thought, people were singing with the idea of the overtone system, where if you sing one note, you hear four notes. That's the natural occurrence of overtones when you sing. And then when colonialism came, I think there was just such a share of culture but also you know trying to understand and trying to live with what was new and we turned it on its head and put our own voice in it

Yeah, I think the celebration of the sonic space, that is just overtones. When, you know, a note resonates in your mouth like a cave, naturally you hear other notes and throat singing is embedded in that very concept. And when you sing a Bach chorale and you sing really openly and, you know, you're creating resonance in your mouth, More than you realize, there's more than one note.

But the more you practice, the more you hear the other notes.

It differs every time. And also, it often depends on the environment. If you play at a concert hall, it would be a certain type of people. If you play at a club, it would be a certain type of people. Now...

In the recent times, what I've seen happen is many people entering the concert hall space when they thought before that they couldn't, and that's really my wish, that people come to concert halls and come and enjoy music without being conscious of how they should be or preparing who they should be.