Soundway Records

Berlin-based sonic poet and composer Dumama offers her debut solo album ‘Towards An Expanse’.

Towards an Expanse Follows the acclaimed 2020 collaborative album “Buffering Juju” with Kechou, a fellow South African musician and artist, lauded as Global album of the month and “a wonderfully inventive debut” in The Guardian.

Sometimes gospel, sometimes electro-psychedelic space travel, the project starts with a languid lament that whispers a close-to-the ear invitation up and between the folds of what unfurls into an ever-expanding sonic universe. Towards an Expanse began in 2019 at Figure 8 Studios (Brooklyn, NYC) under the generous guidance of Shahzad Ismaily, and has since evolved into a companion, a pulsating vessel of grief, vitality, and reclamation. The album meditates on learning to live with damage while regaining autonomy over how Black life is archived: a dialogue between the artist, her ancestors, voices like Miriam Makeba, Busi Mhlongo, Princess Magogo, Madosini, and the psychoacoustics of South Africa’s lore as a timeless technology. It brings these elders into a conversation with Dumama’s global orientation and experimental sensibilities – merging her formative influence with contemporary artists, Sudan Archives, Bjork, FKA Twigs and Pamela Z. The work has been evolving over a 6 year period and was incubated and held throughout by South Africa–based Andrew Curnow of Mushroom Hour, before joining up with UK label Soundway Records. It was written in Port Alfred and Cape Town, South Africa, initially recorded in NYC USA, crystalized and matured in Berlin, Germany and completed in Johannesburg, South Africa, where musician and producer Nandi Ndlovu reimagined the 2019 NYC recordings with Dumama during a 3 week production workshop that involved Ndlovu sampling and re-arranging the NYC recordings, adding various electronic elements (drums, percussion and basslines), recording additional live musicians and extensive vocal production by Mushroom Hour’s Dion Monti. Rooted in Black ontological understandings of circular time — where we are here, there, nowhere, everywhere — Towards an Expanse mediates realities and excavates the spiritual impulse within, bringing it into the discourse of the now. Produced and arranged with the hands of a feminine force (Nandi Ndlovu), this electro-acoustic body of work travels through radical sonic lineages defying one singular genre: future folk, gospel, left-field electronics, ambient, post-punk, and prog-rock, reminding us that we have much capacity to tap into the infinite. The songs are songs, but also long meditations on more-than-human listening and the sonic lexicons of anti-imperialist logic around grief, love, belonging and death.

It asks us - how do we compose ourselves?