No Longer in the Bundu — Wren Hinds takes SA folk sounds to the world

Don’t Die In The Bundu was inspired, says Hinds, “by a very old survival book distributed in South Africa and Zimbabwe”. But the aptness of the first part of the title was crystallised for Hinds when he and a friend were held up at gunpoint in Cape Town during a photo shoot for the album. 

And there’s a broader meaning in the title — at least for these writers. “Stuck in the bundu”, “She grew up in the bundu” and “It’s out in the bundu” were, when we were young, all ways of denoting something that was in a far-flung place, cut off from the rush of city living, disconnected from the possibilities offered by life until you made the trek to where the real action was.

In having been signed to Bella Union, through a deal that is seeing not just the release of Don’t Die In The Bundu but also vinyl pressings of Hinds’ back catalogue, Hinds is navigating a path out of the bundu for his spry repertoire of songs; finally taking folk music made in South Africa to the world.

Wren Hinds' album 'Don't Die in the Bundu'. (Photo: Supplied)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mm1mw_ZTlDM

Of course, there are other fine musicians operating in the broadly Western folk tradition who have found audiences and collaborators beyond South Africa, including the wizardly Guy Buttery who plays Shakuhachi and Swarmandal on “The Garden”, adding great beauty to the gossamer-light song. And certainly, Hinds’ music cannot be simply labelled ‘folk”, with songs like album closer “Razor Wing” on which his acoustic guitar soars briefly into ethereal, ambient terrain. Plus South Africa’s indigenous folk music is making its way into the world, in a stunningly transmuted form, through artists like Bongeziwe Mabandla.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GT7zzlhd3xc

But Hinds’ signing to Bella Union is the first time that a South African artist, whose music stems from the contemporary folk impulse of the singer-songwriter as imagined by Nick Drake or Sun Kil Moon or Syd Kitchen or Aldous Harding, is bound for a global audience that pays attention to silvery, mercurial material. And he’s doing this with a label head who believes in his work and in the company of some of the very best artists working in the world today: among Wren’s labelmates are Ezra Furman, Warmduscher, Spritualized, Father John Misty, Ural Thomas & The Pain, BC Camplight, Midlake, Beach House and Flaming Lips. A more venerated assembly of talent can hardly be imagined.

Founded in 1997 by Simon Raymonde and Robin Guthrie of Cocteau Twins, and now run solely by Raymonde, Bella Union is that most precious and, in this demystified age, rare of phenomena: a record label that is distinguished by taste and quality of output. Its prestige comes from its identification of, and with, artists of pedigree and creative expression rather than mere fodder for the market. In the quarter-plus century since it was established, Bella Union has grown into a label revered by fans and artists alike, a reliable purveyor of quality which puts it into the UK tradition of long-established artist-facing labels like Rough Trade, 4AD (the original home of the Cocteau Twins), Creation, Factory Records, Postcard Records, Mute, and Domino, and alongside very few contemporaries (Transgressive Records being the only to spring to mind).

With Don’t Die In The Bundu, Hinds is taking South African folk into the world through an album that is unerringly personal and, if not the most immediately personable of records, its mysterious reflective personality revealing itself like the light at dawn, rewarding the patient listener with its particular warmth. It is, you might say, music more of first light than of late night, Hinds’ pandiculated fret buzzing and crying with the swift swathes of his dashing fingerwork. This is a hands-on, stubbornly analogue body of work. You will not miss the heart beating inside that body. 

It’s sweeter still that, although now based in the Cape, Hinds grew up on the South-east coast of KwaZulu-Natal, in the same province where South Africa’s nascent folk scene emerged in the 1960s and produced artists capable of standing alongside their UK and US peers, like John Martyn, Richard Thompson or Karen Dalton.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsPp5owXsVo

Artists like Brian Finch, Colin Shamley, John Oakley-Smith, Edi Nederlander, Paul Clingman, Soupy Carr, Jannie Hofmeyr, John Dennen, Dave Marks, Roger Lucey and Syd Kitchen (about whom you can read in this tribute for Daily Maverick after his death in 2011) and his brother Pete were part of a vibrant folk scene configured around folk clubs, primary of which was the Natal Folk Music Association (NaFMA). Article after article written by journalist Owen Coetzer (full disclosure, Coetzer is the co-author’s father) in Durban’s Daily News or for NaFMA publications lamented the dearth of interest in recording the “wealth of talent” by record companies based in Johannesburg. “Commercialism means instant money: acoustic music does not,” wrote Coetzer in the early 70s. 

“Yet record companies are supposed to cater for all tastes. But there has been discrimination against acoustic music for years — merely because their music will not make a million … No one will take a chance, as that prime fighter for acoustic music, Dave Marks, once told me in a three-hour long interview”.

Actually, acoustic music is what Hinds has made since he first emerged as part of Hinds Brothers, a duo he formed with his brother Aden. Their independently released album Ocean of Milk (2014) — which you can still buy on Bandcamp - is filled with fine, immaculately rendered tunes and compass points to the future, songs like “Fool of Me” and “The Drifter” (here performed live) embodying a simple and stark beauty. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96JrEpitAgw

Hinds’ solo work on Tragedy Hill, A Thousand Hearts and A Child’s Chant for the New Millennium is also getting the attention it deserves through special limited vinyl editions of each album, with only 200 copies of each album being put into circulation. The vinyls are coming through Bella Union’s imprint Private Pressing. 

“I wanted to start releasing some brand new artists via our new imprint Private Pressing, a limited vinyl-only eco-friendly edition, working with DeepGrooves who claim to be ‘the world’s greenest pressing plant’,” said Raymonde in announcing the imprint. 

The 10 tracks on Don’t Die In The Bundu continues the expressive, expansive musical approach that Hinds has developed over the course of a life on the margins of the music business and behind the lines of song and singing. He’s an amazingly unaffected vocalist, all the more effective for being utterly un-showy and immersed in his sound. His songs, you feel, would be the vehicles for vocal theatrics in less careful and less care-taking artists and there’s never a moment that feels forced, too thought out or over-cooked.  

The album was recorded in a timber cabin in the South Peninsula mountainside, about 40km outside of Cape Town, and nature infiltrates the project, the elements of water, air, earth and fire seeping in throughout. 

On the single “Dream State” the singer finds himself being “swept away by a cold-hearted southern wind, the tide keeps me rolling me in and the waves hit my back again …” Fatherhood (Hinds became a parent in December 2021) also surfaces in the affecting “Restless Child” which is accompanied by a beautiful video directed and animated by Johannesburg-based artist Thabang Lehobye. 

Especially moving, Dream State comes with a Calvin Thompson-directed video.  

“I’m fascinated and enchanted by the dream world,” said Hinds on the single’s release. “It’s a subject I love to touch on from time to time, and ‘Dream State’ pretty much came out of a dream experience I had in which I was being thrown around by a tumultuous, playful ocean along a rocky coastline. The beauty about a song or poem is that it’s always relative to the listener’s situation and is always open to interpretation through the listener’s experiences, so in this regard, I try to remind myself of this whenever I’m in a writing mode, and try not to fill in too many of the blanks.” 

In a mostly insular process of songwriting and recording, alongside Buttery Hinds drew on a handful of carefully considered artists — Moodship (AKA Gary Thomas) plays bowed guitars on “The Garden” and “Gilded by the Sun, Silvered by the Moon” with Oddo Bam contributing drums on “Father” and “A Wasted Love”.

Other than that it’s purely Wren Hinds. And his music is as honest and pure as any music you could wish to hear, at any time. And, in these cynical, impure times, it feels like nothing less than a wave of ocean water hitting you in the back and knocking you off your feet. DM