mpho works across disciplines of film, music, and art. With a scholarly practice that cuts across Sociology, Environmental Humanities, Management and Organisations, and Literary Studies.
About
HEAVY KATS is a Black Studies Progamme co-founded by interdisciplinary scholar, producer, writer, and creative business strategist mpho ndaba, together with sound engineer, film composer, and producer Elu Eboka of EBK Studio in Shortmarket Street in Cape Town. The joint venture emerges in the context of fraught recording industries, expanding on the available infrastructure for artists across disciplines of black music, perrformance, visual art, and critical cultural writing to work together to preserve, critique, and advance socially responsive art on the African continent and its diasporas.
Approach
HEAVY KATS works on the principles of collaboration, a co-ownership model at the level of the partnership between Eboka and ndaba, as well as the artists with whom it works.
Project-based collaboration: Each collaboration between HK and any other artist is project-specific, aimed at recording a project consisting of 3-5 songs for an EP.
Rollout: HK collaborates with the artist to formulate a rollout plan that includes a recorded interview with the artist as part of the background creative process, a press and media interview (maximum of 3), and a critical essay that engages with their work. Pairing the work with a cultural worker, critical writer, and other artist who might be in conversation with the themes of the music
Experimental black music: Responding to the hegemonic modes of listening, HK advances an experimental approach to black music. We take a curatorial approach that is grounded in sonic social critique, alternative imaginations of life, critical engagement with the archive, and rethinking transnational engagements with discourses of black music in Africa and beyond.
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