With her third studio album, pianist, composer and vocalist Thandi Ntuli begins a journey of self-discovery that picks up where 2018’s Exiled left off. “[In 2020] I was two years into the release of the last album,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was outgrowing the place I was at when I made Exiled; it held space for difficult conversations and difficult feelings—but I didn't want to get stuck in that. I became very intentional about bringing joy back to my life, to my outlook. This album is a continuation and a response to Exiled, and it's sharing little anchors and glimpses of certain things that I felt were responsible for bringing me out of that haze.”
Over eight tracks, Blk Elijah and the Children of Meroë journeys through what Ntuli frames as remembering and re-membering. “I like to think of life as cyclical, but I also think that what moves us along is looking back,” she explains. “Re-membering is putting your self together again. I think a lot of people have noticed that about the life that we had accepted as normal, pre-lockdown; there’s a reckoning that you go through when you look back.”
That journey towards forming a new identity and embracing a higher sense of self is encapsulated in the album’s dual titular concepts. “‘Blk Elijah’ is a character I playfully created some years ago, in having a conversation with a friend of mine,” Ntuli explains. “We were talking about [South African group] The Soul Brothers. The organ player's name is Black Moses [Ngwenya]. And I said, "One day I'm going to start playing synths and call myself Black Elijah." For this project, I used the idea of ‘Blk Elijah’ as a character. If you think of your higher self, your better self, or just a guardian energy, it comes into your awareness as something that tears things apart in your life with the purpose of building a better reality. I came across the word ‘Meroë’ from a book that was talking about the African origins of different spiritual traditions in the world, and comparing certain names [with names from] Christianity. They know the Mother Mary, and the different manifestations of that name in different African cultures. ‘Mary’ pointed me to Sudan, and I learned about the area, Meroë, which is an ancient city of Kush, and the name stuck with me. In the context of this album, Meroë is a fictitious place, where I imagine people who have gone past their difficulties by doing the personal inner work and getting to know themselves, live.”
Along with solely featuring her own vocals across the entirety of the project (rather than her usual slate of guest stars) the album sees Ntuli play piano and synth—and record with the same band she performs with live, for the first time: Sphelelo Mazibuko (drums), Keenan Ahrends (guitar), Ndabo Zulu (trumpet), Mthunzi Mvubu (alto saxophone and flute), Shane Cooper (bass guitar), and Nomphumelelo Nhlapo (percussion). Here, Ntuli breaks down the album, track by track.
“Izibongo”
“This is the song that probably highlights the idea of re-membering the most. It’s me singing parts of family praise [chants] that were written by my great-grandfather many years ago. Digging into my ancestral memory has been a huge part of my process of re-membering, even in terms of coming back together—as much as we've known each other [before], we were not the same [now]. Everyone's gone through some type of change because of this disruption or disturbance that we've all experienced collectively, and individual disruptions and disturbances, as well.”
“Cold Winds”
“I wrote this at the end of 2019. Sometimes I just have pictures in my mind, and with ‘Cold Winds’, I had just finished reading a book called Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype [by Dr Clarissa Estés], and that book really tuned me into the psychological power of stories and storytelling, and creating visuals and ideas. ‘Cold Wind’ was this image in my mind of snow—of someone who's walking in a snowstorm, and it's cold, but that journey can lead you to a place where you find yourself at home. So it was using the elements as a way of telling the story that the bad times don't last. Sometimes, you can get to a better place because of the difficulties that you experience.”
“Amazing Grace”
“‘Amazing Grace’, was a retake on the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’, but I also wanted to tell my own version of what grace feels like to me, as well. In lockdown, I was thinking, 'How does joy feel? What does happiness feel like? How does it sound or feel?' And the music, for me, that always circled back to that feeling was Brazilian music—samba, more so than bossa nova. So many times I'll be listening to a beautiful song from Brazil—and the lyrics are morbid. It's such a sad song, but it sounds so joyful. And I think that is a huge characteristic of African music, and music from different parts of the world. It just feels so good, even if it's so sad. I think I drew more from the Latin influence and a little bit from Central African rumba. But the main thing that I was doing musically was just acknowledging that sometimes music just makes you feel that feeling of joy and grace.”
“Portal Into a New World”
“‘Portal Into a New World’ is just a different version of a song that I performed and recorded before; this one I wrote some time ago. It's the band's favourite song. It's really about this experience of going inwards, representing, being in a different environment, a new world—literally, a new experience. But I also think that's also reflective of what is external. We have a new reality. And it's weird because it's almost like partly people are going back into it, and it feels like nothing happened. But, at the same time, everyone knows and senses on a very deep level that something has happened. Something is very different about the way life is now, even if we can't always put our finger on it.”
“Go Gently As the Sower Reaps”
“I wrote this in 2020. I was part of a digital cohort of musicians who were commissioned to write pieces for an exhibition called Inflorescence, exhibited at The Showroom in London, and it had various composers from around the world writing around the central theme of inflorescence, of budding flowers that are growing. I wrote ‘Go Gently’ with a sense of when the wind is cold, and you're just spinning and you don't know what's what, and where to start and where to end, sometimes it's best to just surrender.' And it usually gets you to the other side when you step out of the panic.”
“Secret Keeper”
“Going back to finding out information about my lineage, where I come from, my personal family history, and in that way learning a lot about history from my family—what I [realised] is that that there's a lot about Africans, our heritage, that is kept from us. And I deliberately say, 'Kept from us,' because we never get this information at school. There is so much wealth in our history, and there's such a sense of connectedness I feel when I know my history a lot deeper—and I think it would sort out so many issues in society, if we felt that connectedness to each other. I kept having the sound of the vocals that are in Thomas Chauke's music [in my head]. It was just the thing that was just constantly coming back at me—that melodic sound. Or songs like Chico Twala—those sounds that we grew up with. And I ended up settling on an XiTsonga proverb, which basically translates to, 'Whatever is hidden in the dark will eventually come out.' I chose Tsonga, not just because of the vocals that I was feeling were referencing that sound, but also because it's a cultural language that's been marginalised in this country, and there's all sorts of [judgmental things] people say about Tsonga people or Shangaan people. I just thought it would be cool for me to step into that world and step into that language. I was experimenting with that, as well—writing in a language that I've never really written in, and also just capturing that message in the song.”
“No Wrong Turn”
“I think in many ways the songs are also characters. ‘No Wrong Turn’ came from this realisation that even when you start, and you're in the cold wind and it seems it's rough, at the end of it all you'll actually realise that everything that was happening, was happening for you, and it's a very soothing experience to [realise that] you've been guided the whole time, even when you felt like you were alone, or you were in the pits and nobody knew what was going on. For me, it was almost a realisation that, 'Oh, my gosh, of course everything is fine.' And just to show, again, the cyclical nature of things where we go up, then we go down, we go round and round.”
“Inkululeko”
‘Inkululeko’ [‘freedom’] is what lies on the other side of having the courage to dig in and reconstruct yourself and your views and your life and heal yourself. The other side of it is a sense of freedom. Inner freedom, because I'm also very cognisant of the fact that freedom is not something that's been fully realised in society. And I can't yet say that, 'Society, I'm free,' but I do think that the starting point of freedom is internal. It comes from realising, first and foremost, that you're not free, having some vision of what freedom looks and feels like, that you can now work towards actually building or manifesting externally. So it was a conclusion, but not a conclusive thing. It's not that I'm free and we're all free, but I think that what I've just gone through, the process I've just gone through, has unlocked the journey to freedom. I feel free, at least, from a certain portion of life. I feel free from certain things.”
Tracklist:
- Thandi Ntuli - Izibongo
- Thandi Ntuli - Cold Winds
- Thandi Ntuli - Amazing Grace
- Thandi Ntuli - Portal Into A New World
- Thandi Ntuli - Go Gently As The Sower Reaps
- Thandi Ntuli - Secret Keeper
- Thandi Ntuli - No Wrong Turn
- Thandi Ntuli - Inkululeko
Stream the full Album below.
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