Last week Nyege Nyege Tapes announced Chaka Chawasarira’s album. I was so looking forward to this day!
At one point during our activities in 2023, it occurred to us that we were documenting all the parts, but not the whole, and while we were trying our best to enable anyone to build and learn the instrument, its music still is relatively little known, even in Zimbabwe.
In order to really attract new students, we would have to showcase the beauty of the music, too. So we decided to record an album, once all documentation work was done.
By this time, I was already gone, and after two and a half months of intensive documentation work, Sekuru and the remaining project team were already starting to feel exhausted. Nonetheless Kuda Samora Nyaruwabvu – who deservedly ended up on the LP cover, too – did a great job recording all songs late at night with Sekuru in his living room, when the Chitungwiza neighbourhood had finally fallen asleep.
We originally planned to put the tracks on Bandcamp ourselves. After my friend and sound engineer Amaury Groc and I finished a first mix, Christoph Linder (Ambuya Stella Chiweshe’s booking agent, and the one who organized the Zonke Family tour in 2019) suggested to try to get the music released on a label.
And just after a few emails in various directions, the Nyege Nyege folks replied “this is absolutely stunning” and said they wanted to release the album both digitally and on * v i n y l *. One of the hippest labels for African club music – kind of the jackpot for matepe visibility!
Due to the many other releases in their pipeline, it took almost another 1.5 years — plenty of time to rework the mixes several times, occasionally almost to the point of obsession, trying to bring out every single note. But I think the result was worth it, and we learned a lot along the way.
Here’s a blog post about the recording process, another one about mixing the album will come soon.
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