SA: Msaki and Tubatsi Moloi release joint album Synthetic Hearts

The 10-track project, which is available for streaming and download on major digital platforms, comes after the release of the duo’s lead single ‘Zibonakalise’.

Synthetic Hearts was released via Nø Førmat! records and features French cellist Clément Petit. The album is testimony that Msaki, Moloi and Petit are individual artists with discographies that demonstrate the ability to shapeshift between genres.

While Msaki and Moloi’s folk sensibilities are evident in the album, it too defies easy categorisation, mixing live and electronic elements, as Petit explores different cello textures.

As a child raised in a Parisian banlieue community, Petit’s approach is influenced by his early exposure to Afro-American, Caribbean and electronic music. His vast experience in contemporary and improvised music, and his desire to constantly reinvent instruments, rewrite rules and develop new musical languages can also be attributed to his upbringing. “He doesn’t treat the cello like a classical cellist,” Msaki said.

The album, Moloi said, “speaks about having an equal responsibility to look after each other” and questions how “we express feelings of love towards one another.”

Synthetic Hearts began with ideas from Petit’s archives, with Msaki and Moloi selecting the songs that resonated with them, to forge something new together over a week-long residency in April 2021. The album was composed at Nirox Sculpture Park, just outside Johannesburg. In ‘Madonna’, the trio sings of leaves turning colour, but also about relationships, as they move in and out of ease. 

Msaki, who describes herself as a “songcatcher”, moves seamlessly between electronic dance, folk, pop, and amapiano. Her heartfelt lyrics express the entangled personal and political. Her sophomore album Platinumb Heart (2021), won her both Female Artist of the Year and Best Adult Contemporary Album accolades at the 2022 South African Music Awards. She is also known for multiple chart-topping collaborations with Black Coffee, Diplo, Prince Kaybee, Sun El Musician.

Similarly, as part of the four-piece collective Urban Village, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Moloi’s music digs into the strata of the post-apartheid reality, grounding itself in the quotidian experiences of township life in Soweto and moving across and beyond folk, rock, mbaqanga and maskandi and more.