Now available: the EP ‘BETTER IS GOLD’ from Enid Ze.
You can hear it via the platform of your choice at this link.
Enid Ze is a musical vision conceived and directed by Zimbabwean-born singer/songwriter Nyasha Chiundiza, produced and mixed by yours truly, with invaluable aid+participation from so many of my most dear musical collaborators. It is not lightly that I tell you: Nyasha is a visionary and an iconoclast. Here’s some words about the project from the man himself, but please don’t take his (or my) words for it. Check out the tracks. This is something else, and something wonderful. From NC:
enid ze is a continuation and reimagining of the Southern African tradition of Zamrock—W.I.T.C.H. Keith Mlevhu, Wells Fargo—where global pop and rock come to cohere in specific existential experiences of living many worlds at once. Listen to the panting on the title track “Better is Gold” and remember Letta Mbulu. When you hear “Marechera” recall modernist African writer Dambudzo Marechera’s poem, Punkpoem:
In the song
Are waterfruits;
In the plush and flow
Firestars eternally fixed.
Guitar strings lash
My back, draw blood –
The out of control voice
Skids shrieking across
Tarmac audiences.
When you hear “Shuwa” hear the word “sure” but also the waves on the beaches of Maputo, Mozambique. Or the beer gardens of downtown Harare. Also listen to how far home and how close it is, how unrest and rest lie together like a lion and lamb.
“Better is Gold” is about the condition of seeking more than you see—not in the future but in the things that you find along the way. “Better” is better than gold.
One reply on ““Better Is Gold”: Debut EP from Enid Ze: Available now”
[…] enid ze, is the sonicscape brainchild fleshed by Zimbabwean-born Yale University graduate of Philosophy of Religion and musician Nyasha Chiundiza. The work of mediating his imagination and daydreams through music has been a part of Nyasha’s life from the age of eight as he was growing up in the suburbs of Harare, Zimbabwe. Under the moniker enid ze, the music created by the artist can be described as pop-rock created from a state of mind floating between experiences of home and abroad. However, this category of definition omits so much of the experimental and genre untethered creative work done by Nyasha as enid ze. At the heart of his creations and this experience, ze is inspired by Zamrock (W.I.T.C.H., Wells Fargo, Keith Mhlevu, Paul Ngozi and his Ngozi Family) along with the Southern African musical movement of the 70s which took its inspiration from Garage and Psychedelic Rock. Last month saw Nyasha release his debut EP Better is Gold, an eight track wonder which one could argue attempts to imaginatively answer the impossible question: “what would Zamrock sound like today?”. Melancholic, exuberant and defiant with the curiosity, shock and nostalgia that comes with being in new places, revisiting old places, facing new quandaries and old ones. Of new loves, old loves—geographically and psychically situated. Quite effortlessly ze contemporizes the Zamrock sound, assisted with newer sounds from Rnb to Grunge. To quote a post by composer, producer and collaborator on the project Chris Ruggiero: […]