Vusumzi Nkomo
In love, or quite frankly, romantic love, one is offered an opportunity to experience another, to experience love and life with another, and to (experience) love in time. This, according to French philosopher Alain Badiou’s critique of modern love in William Williamson’ short film, is fundamentally opposed to modernist notions of the individual. And of course I’m interested in this love, which poet/writer Nikki Giovanni calls “a tremendous responsibility”, and its relation to time: as two people, ensconced in a world of their making, watching life, watching as life happens, unfolds. I think this unfolding is the base upon which the form and themes of iimini are explored by the artist.
iimini by Bongeziwe Mabandla is a beautiful body of work, not only because of his haunting & meditative, introspective voice, the tenderness of his falsettos, but the way in which the songs are carefully assembled:
They are linked, delicately knitted together. A song deliberately leads to and carries the energy of the next song, strung together with curatorial deliberateness. The songs disappear into one another, like life, like our days, iimini zethu. One song’s ending deployed as the other song’s beginning. And the artist explains that he “always wants to have a sense of beginning and an end in all my work.”
A song deliberately leads to and carries the energy of the next song,
This brilliance doesn’t emerge out of nowhere: in Umlilo, the last song ‘Ntembisweni’ drags us abruptly into an abyss, a silence we never asked for and it is unclear whether the sound will resurface, as singing or speech and save us from this indefinite performative silence. (Of course when a 9 minute song is brought into an abrupt stop midway, you expect something- even though in the final song on iimini ‘ndiyakuthanda (12.4.19 )’ the singing does not resurface except for drops of drizzling rain and a gentle swishing of leaves). It is this unexpected turn, or gesture if you may, that makes Bongeziwe an interesting artist. On iimini what we see is a clear vision, with clear aesthetic and thematic objectives.
A song deliberately leads to and carries the energy of the next song,
A fidelity to thematic unity is observed by the artist throughout the project. This forward looking and imaginative neo-soul album sounds like a whole spliced into 12 conjoining parts. “I wanted the songs to tell a story together and also paint a picture. The songs are about one theme and message even though they are different; they needed to have a sense of oneness.” Apart from the serenading folk vocals on guitar laced with electronic beats, Bongeziwe draws us, almost cinematically, into his world, which he constructs usually at the tail end of each song by way of creating delicate ambience with sounds, speeches, nature, and iGwijo:
we get a sense of the buzzing streets as ‘ndanele’ fades faintly carrying the following tune, ‘zange’; horns in harmony with bucking dogs and passing cars, encapsulating the sounds and musics of the outside while ‘zange’ slowly grows into the full sound the song is known for.
Bongeziwe draws us, almost cinematically, into his world
‘masiziyekelele (14.11.16)’ carries the energy of and melody of ‘salanabani (13.8.18)’, the end of ‘ukwahlukana (#027) is the entry into ‘bambelela kum (4.6.18)’, the last few seconds of ‘bambelela kum (4.6.18)’ see Bongeziwe harmonising sorrowfully with chirping birds giving a ‘foresty’ effect, that leads us seamlessly to ‘isiphelo (#untitled)’.
He tells me: “I always write music from an honest place and the first thing I do is first explain the message as though I’m telling a friend or something, writing a letter about the situation. Writing music is like writing a book. You have to paint the situation for the listener and every word you use has to add to the description.”
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