Tolika Mtoliki

*Tolika Mtoliki*, a six-track album from Johannesburg-based performance art band The Brother Moves On, is a meditation on history and the ways it dictates our day-to-day lives. “The personal is always political,” the band’s frontman, Siyabonga Mthembu, tells Apple Music. “As \[black people\] we have this fear that history, or the archive, will forget us. But the question is which archive are we referring to? Our music lives in the hearts of our people.” Half seance and half ambush, *Tolika Mtoliki* is an album not afraid to run with its fists raised, tackling issues such as colonialism (“You Think You Know Me”) and migrant labour (“Kea Bereka”). Here, Siyabonga Mthembu breaks down the inspiration for each track. **“You Think You Know Me”** “The first version of ‘You Think You Know Me’ didn’t have a poem in it. The record label heard an early version and asked us to add a poem to it. One day I was sitting with my mother, writing a poem, and she was helping me write it. We released it during the July \[2021\] riots. I was down with COVID and I called my record label and told them to release the song. The same kind of pain that inspired the riots, inspired me to write that record.” **“For Mo”** “‘For Mo’ is a record we wrote in homage to the late jazz pianist Moses Molelekwa. It’s a song we wrote years ago. Mo’s album, *Genes and Spirits* saved my life. I used to listen to it when I was young, broke and unsure about what I wanted to do with my life. When I was growing in Tembisa, I used to work for my mother, and Mo’s family home was a few houses down from my mother’s house. He’s always been part and parcel of what I am and who we are as a band.” **“We Madoda”** “We’ve always believed \[as a band\] that the personal is always politic. ‘We Madoda’ is a song about capitalism. It\'s asking why we’ve stopped farming? Why is capitalism the only way for us to feed ourselves? That’s the song’s biggest metaphor. It’s also inspired by the Thomas Sankara quote: ‘He who feeds you controls you’.” **“Anishilabi”** “You know when a youngster hears a song and goes, ‘Wow, I love that song’ and then you actually introduce them to the original? That’s the whole point of ‘Anishilabi’ and the music we do. This is a remake of a song by \[’70s jazz outfit\] Batsumi. We hope the music can introduce our audience to the wealth of South African music out there. Someone’s going to listen to this and discover Batsumi. Which is the point of the whole project: no one ever gets forgotten.” **“Kea Bereka”** “‘You know, most of the problems we have as black people are linked to the essential problem of the black family being eradicated by migrant labour. This might actually be the first generation that’s learning to live and work with their wives. The song isn’t trying to excuse that, but to contextualise where we come from as a people and where we still have to go.”

Interpreting the before and beyond of the South African sonic • Tolika Mtoliki – literally, interpret Interpreter – is TBMO giving new voice to the wisdom of South African musical elders. • The first single from the album - “You Think You Know Me” - reworks the original with words and an urgency that calls South Africa’s democracy and progress since 1994 into question • “Just brilliant” – Gilles Peterson, BBC • Audio mastered and cut for vinyl by Frank Merritt at The Carvery with heavyweight 180g vinyl pressed at Pallas in Germany **Merchandise for TBMO available here: fanbaseafrica.co.za/collections/the-brother-moves-on/ TBMO first revisited the works of elders Batsumi and Malombo whilst on tour in Europe during 2018 and 2019. In collaboration with Matsuli Music an idea was seeded to record these works specifically for a vinyl release. With these recordings, TBMO work to re-stitch a torn cloth. These songs are critical shards of a fractured sonic, social and political inheritance. They are the sound-work of the elders – Mongezi Feza, Johnny Dyani, the Malopoets, Batsumi, and Philip Tabane, and they come with a blessing from Moses Taiwa Molelekwa. Called into the circle for this session, they speak old wisdom in new voices, and what they have to give is not measured in distance from a so- called original version. TBMO is a South African performance art and music ensemble from Johannesburg formed in 2009 by brothers Nkululelo and Siyabonga Mthembu whilst watching an episode of the US TV-drama The Wire. The name is a misconfiguration of a fictional character, The Brother Mouzone, from The Wire. Since 2009 they have released two albums, A New Myth (2013) and The Golden Wake (2015).