KAANG

KAANG

Reunion island / Lesotho

Their music is crystalline, aerial, ethereal and still, the emotion it creates moves us deep inside. It is an emotion that seems to come from immemorial times, as if was part of our roots, somewhere along the origin of the world.

Electro music producer from Reunion Island, Labelle and South African producer and singer Hlasko both grow in their personal project the same curiosity for traditional music and for sacred traditions.

Together they created Kaang, a band shaping a music bridge between two “islands”: Reunion Island located in the Indian Ocean and Lesotho, a mountainous country in the heart of South Africa which didn’t suffer Apartheid and appears as an island within the continent. The link between the two isolated lands is revealed by the compositions of these two poets.

Put the intangible into music.

Labelle and Hlasko have in common a rare capacity to capture emotion, to put the intangible into words and music.They lead the listener to dive into a rift in space and time between past and future.

The two artists met in 2013. Labelle was looking for South African electronic music and got captivated by Hlasko’ singularity when he discovered his soundcloud.

A few emails later, they met up during Labelle’s tour in South Africa. They recorded three improvised tracks in Johannesburg whose titles “Néo” and “Lait sacré” are on Labelle’s album “Ensemble”.

The urge to a joint creation was born. The two artists share the same artistic approach and both have multiple influences. Like Labelle, Hlasko is influenced by diverse types of music: “the kind of weird music” that his mum used to listen to (Nico and the Velvet underground, Pink Floyd, Grace Jones) and the traditional musical heritage of Lesotho he explores even deeper since his mother died.

Upset by the ritual of transmission during the funeral, the 21 years old artist is since then invested of a mission: sharing his culture.The quest for identity and need of transmission can be found as well in Labelle’s approach of music. Since he has been mixing vinyl discs belonging to his dad who’s from Reunion Island with his own sets, the artist draws on the ancestral rituals of Reunion Island to design his electro-maloya.

The man who makes the rain sing.

Within Kaang, both musicians explore together the Bushmen mythology. Kaang is in the creator of all things in Bushmen mythology. This name has an echo in the way Hlasko uses animism in his texts written in Sesotho, where he identifies with things, animals or elements and lets them express themselves. He has a wonderful capacity to make the rain sing.

Kaang evokes as well the passion for Bushmen music which was already influencing both artists before they met. Being an explorer of poetry and ancient texts of his mother’s land Lesotho, Hlasko couldn’t avoid being attracted by Bushmen its first inhabitants. As for Labelle, a recent discovery provides a different perspective on his passion. Following his family tree he realized that he had an ancestor from Mozambique, where Bushmen lived way before the arrival of other ethnic groups.

The natural affinity between the two artists seems, loaded with a magical dimension with a symbolic ancestral and hidden connection.

Suddenly, we get to understand better the powerful emotion achieved by their music, a je-ne-sais-quoi from the past as overwhelming as it is reassuring.

Isabelle Kichenin