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.

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

style="font-weight: 400;">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.

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.  

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” (