BŪJIN on her journey and time at Red Bull Studios Cape Town

The multi-faceted artist shares her journey that led to the creation of her latest solo work

Dani Kyengo, working as BŪJIN, is a Kenyan-South African sound artist, vinyl selector, turntablist and live instrumental composer. Her sound is playfully dark, textured and tender all at once; weaving together memories, noise, sound, instrumentation, vocals and bass-driven drum derivations.

Her music centres around collaboration and creating playful, layered musical listening experiences of live performance, composition and production – BŪJIN curates and prefers to treat this like a journey - depending on her medium and mood an audience can experience anything from unique turntablism and live experiments to soft tropical flavours and live violin samples, deep breaks, beats, benga, glitchy vocal laments, and organ-heavy jazz hymns. Her sound is something like a carefully picked, sonically intricate journey into a memory mine where stitchings of classical orchestrations meets East-African techno, funk, choral harmonies, hymn-like soundscapes, vocals, strings, Ethio-synths and vibraphone compositions.

When she's not otherwise advocating for radical black girl joy in her work. She is dedicated to incubating thoughtful sonic productions, selections and producing music that test mainstream imaginings of what composition, dj-ing, production, abstracting and demystifying classical music-making and choreography can look like for an audience engaging with her work - from stage to your bedroom to your dancefloor.

In studio to work on her upcoming solo album, we caught up with her to find out about her journey as an artist, the sounds of her childhood, her other projects and what she's been working on in studio. Read the full interview below.

What kind of music was playing at home and was it a musical house?

It was a very artistic house, a very musical house. I was born in Joburg, grew up in the Northern Cape in Namaqualand. My mom’s family is from Namaqualand, my dad’s family is East African. Most of the music in the house was like ghoema, orkes, banjo, my ouma loved that music. Lots of church music, lots of hymns because my great-grandmother was a church organist and organ composer. On my mom’s side of things, there was a lot. Everything from Toni Braxton to jazz to Earl Duke to B.B. King to punk and pop, my mom is the first person to introduce me to kwaito as a child.

I started playing the flute when I was five and from there played in the orchestra and choir. I started playing the piano in Grade 5, then the violin soon after that. Then I played for my school’s orchestra and then my music school’s orchestra. I feel like it kind of snowballed. I started music completely of my own accord. I was in Grade 1 or 2 and the teacher asked who in the class wants to go to the music teacher because there are recorder lessons. Two other people and I got up, I didn’t even know where the class was I just knew I had to go. I felt like I wanted to do that. From there it just became a love for music because there was always such an obsession with music in my home, growing up with my mom, her music and CD collection and my grandmother’s record collection were really fundamental in how they shaped my understanding music and also the variety of music. My old cousins were really the first to introduce me to techno and house and EDM, really ridiculous 90s/early 2000s house tracks like Everything But The Girl’s “Missing”.

When did you move away from the more formal way of musical expression?

When I got really fucking tired after high school! After high school, I think I was just really exhausted because of teachers’ and tutors’ expectations of me in music. Then it was doing Eisteddfods. It just became a lot. Formulaic and demanding. Orchestra I’d have twice a week, lessons and rehearsals twice a week. So that’s four days out of a week dedicated to an instrument, composition and writing, basically like school the whole time. Which I’m very thankful for at the same time because that rigour gives you a different kind of discipline which you can apply to anything.

I stopped having an interest in wanting to continue studying classical music into Uni because I was just really tired. I went to Uni in the Eastern Cape and there’s a massive culture around music and arts there, the National Arts Festival is in Makhanda, people have a great relationship with musical acts. The Standard Bank Youth Jazz Band comes and plays there, all the young jazz artists of the year come and play there at least once a year. So there’s a deep relationship to jazz, to bass and bass-driven house music. There was also a great beat scene happening in Makhanda at the time, there was an underground party called New Folder that was being thrown by a bunch of cats from the art department and it got handed over to a wonderful black woman who turned it into a melinated, queer beat party. The premise of it was that everyone who was playing would come with a new folder of music. So that got me into DJing, but I never really believed the idea of me being a DJ or something like that, but it’s a really great way for me to play with music and to listen to music and keep expanding my ear and what I like.

When did you start producing?

It was around the same time that I started DJing. There were a lot of things that happened during my time in Makhanda and that was one of them. I liked playing with sound because I had access to a lot of editing programs at the time and started exploring DAWs and freeware. At the underground beat party, people just shared a lot. That’s what I appreciated about the insular nature of the space and how people related to one another. We would share things with one another, we’d go to each other’s houses, one person is playing something new and people would be talking. Who is this? Where did you find it? What do you use this for? What is a DAW? So there were people that were painters, people doing drama, sound techs, and people would share things. I started messing around with a freeware DAW called Audacity and started building from there. But it came from playing. Everything that involves me or making music I try and maintain the route of playing. Because without that what are we doing? How do you stumble onto new things without the impetus to play? Creating from the pure joyful place of innocence.

You’ve been working on a series called Negraaah, can you expand on the project?

Negraaah is a mixed series. It’s basically building an archive of sonic volumes where different artists or people who work with sound or words or explorations in sound and sonics can create a mix and feature that on the platform. It’s building an archive of open access sonic work for people to be able to come, listen to, engage with. I like to do it sometimes when I’m traveling or invited to do a radio show or a vinyl mix or a mix somewhere, I’ll ask would you like me to put on a volume of this or we can call it a volume of this and I’ll share it on my platforms and they share it on their platforms. So it’s still in its development. I’m figuring out my role in relation to that and how the idea of being a collector is very warped and in my opinion very fucked up, it’s very colonial. So figuring out my position in collecting and archiving and trying to approach it from a place of being open and ever-changing and honest. It’s still a work in progress and it’s building.

You were in studio for a week. What were you working on?

I was working on a solo project that’s been coming for a while now. The majority of the work started in this last year. The bulk of it was built in the last half of last year, between August and October. The project is really playful! It has a couple of features on it. It features some trumpets, violins, some other collaborations with other musicians like Dylan Fine from Beat Sampras on guitar, Keegan Steenkamp is on trumpet, there are a couple of producers doing edits on some works. Xee who runs Globalize Yourself Stereo did an edit, Surreal Sessions, Saint Deep Throat. The idea of the project is to maintain that root of being playful. There are a lot of influences from everything I’m influenced by in terms of sound. So you’ll find some soul, some jazz, house, deep bass kind of beats. This project has been an idea that’s been brewing in my head for the longest time and it’s finally fleshing itself out and becoming a full human. The first single I plan on releasing in February. I keep saying playful, but it’s just playful! Something to dance to, to move to. There’s a lot of emotion, a lot of darkness, melancholy but also happiness. Trying to be honest.

What kind of audience do you want to connect with through this project and what do you want them to take from it?

Audience is a tricky question because when you work with any kind of medium, sound, pictures, words when you approach your work whether it’s in collaboration or by yourself I try and approach things with as much openness and care as possible. Sometimes thinking so far ahead about an audience is hard to do in the beginning stage because you are just trying to produce something that is tender. Something that can be anything. Something that’s absolutely innocent. Thinking about an audience can sometimes stifle you in the beginning process into producing something that is a product more than something that is tender and that has the capacity to live on its own. It’s a pure expression and audiences can choose themselves to engage with it. So for me when it comes to audience there is a part of this project that is very much just made for feeling, for me, for things that I was going through when making it, feelings I choose to express through music and I feel there are people as audience members or listeners or whatever they choose to call themselves who will resonate with that and then take that, use that, be with it as they want to and come back and revisit it if they want to. That for me is enough to expect from an audience. There are some ones that I intentionally want people to go to and groove to. I’ve made this for you to go and groove so go groove! Go and sweat if you want. So I think that’s my relationship between the audience and me as the maker. It’s a constant of making something that might be rejected or it might be loved, perhaps not here, because South African audiences also like what they like, so it can be a tricky place to make things, but there’s such a plethora of people and audiences that I feel will resonate with parts of songs that have a jazzy screamo vibe to it or a new beat pop vibe, then there are ballads with strings on them that will make you want to listen to them when you’re really in a fucking dark place and going through the motions and there are parts you want to shake your ass to.

Do you have a tentative release date?

I plan on releasing a second single before releasing the full album, something slightly different from the first single, and that is possibly May/April.

Any other projects coming up or are you going to tour the album?

I’m working on my Masters at the same time! I’m researching sound, art and performance. Specifically the relationship between sound, choreography and composition. How composition can be a language in choreography and how the two speak to one another and looking at the history of that. So I’m playing with my Masters and I’m playing with album and possibly touring. I have some things in the pipeline for Europe, some people I’ve been speaking to that side. I’m going to Joburg soon to do 3 or 4 shows. But because this year is so busy, so consuming, I’m just taking it day by day, minute by minute! Taking things as they come.

Connect with BŪJIN on Facebook, Instagram and Soundcloud

This interview first appeared on RedBullMusic.com

In Studio: BŪJIN playfully explores sonics