Abel Selaocoe has been on my radar since his viral video on TikTok performing “Ka Bohaleng [On the Sharp Side]” from his first album, Hae Ke Kae [Where Is Home]. Since then, he has gained notoriety as a performer and composer, and earlier this year even performed an NPR Tiny Desk Concert.
So I was thrilled to learn earlier this year that he had another album coming out, Hymns of Bantu, that builds on all the best elements of Hae Ke Kae.
It is difficult to describe what makes this music so special without falling back on empty platitudes. The album is certainly “unique” and “inventive” but those words don’t do it any justice—and it is “genre-defying,” but that is such a vague term as to be essentially useless.
Instead it’s perhaps best to use Selaocoe’s own words from the opening track, “Tsohle tsohle,” a Sesotho phrase that means “everything is everything.” Expanding on that idea, Selaocoe says that “everything is made by you in the image of you.”
And that is the experience of the album: you truly feel an infusion of Selaocoe’s essence in the music, whether he’s performing Bach, Marais, South African traditional songs, or his own compositions.
Some of these sounds would be familiar to American audiences. “Emmanuele,” for one, would sound right at home next to Paul Simon’s Graceland.
“Dinaka,” on the other hand, transports the listener to an entirely different world with extended vocal techniques and atmospheric sounds that seem to envelop you in a sound bath.
Selaocoe follows the track with a vocal improvisation on a seventeenth-century French cello suite by Marin Marais, and while that may sound like a recipe for emotional whiplash from the earlier piece, it perfectly balances the earlier dissonance with a meditative, prayerful vibe.
Hymns of Bantu shows Abel Selaocoe doing what he does best: being himself, proudly, and welcoming along to experience it with him.
