Electronic music is having a moment and it’s a global cultural zeitgeist. Locally, house music dominates; cool kids Okmalumkoolkat and Spoek Mathambo are fronting the digital arena, bringing futuristic nuances to the genre and emerging female stars like Moonchild Sanelly add variety to the fold. If you take dance and pop out of the equation, you find singer, songwriter and composer, Ola Kobak, in a corner of Pretoria, breathing soul into and experimenting with electronic music organically, with a poetic sensibility.
Kobak and Sanelly are two of the only visible female musicians playing in the electronic music field. Sanelly has Blk Jks drummer, Tshepang Ramoba, as her producer. Kobak has her experimental musician husband, Jacob Israel, as her collaborator. And they’ve been at it for a while.
In 2010 under the band name, Fulka, Kobak released the debut album, The Mystery Of The Seven Stars, a fresh blend of folk-tronica with a dash of her Polish roots.
This was a pioneering move given that no one was playing this niche sub-genre in South Africa then, although it had already etched itself internationally for more than a decade, with origins in Europe.
Fulka was an ambitious project backed up by quality. It boasted a full soundscape with banjos, the viola, piano, trumpets and the double bass. The inclusion of the progressive Marcus Wyatt only elevated it.
Fulka put Kobak on the national radar and the local festival scene – from Oppikoppi to Splashy Fen. Five years later she is back with a new album, Metanoia, released digitally in December as an eight-track offering. As the title suggests, the album is a metaphor for a change of heart and it boasts a new approach.
Kobak has dropped the name Fulka and has gone into herself to produce music that’s minimalistic, more emotive and ambient, with a moody edge. Its simplicity is its sophistication and this is translated in the video of the first single, Flow.
“I started writing new material in late 2012. I took leave and went to Kommetjie. I spent a lot of time alone for three weeks and recorded the album myself. I learnt a lot about production and becoming more independent,” she says.
“Initially, I was insecure, but I looked inside this time around, and did not care much about structure. I allowed the music to lead and fed off from that spiritual and emotional process. I believe in the long run my sound could change even more.”
Again in 2012, she and Israel started the duo project, A Hollow In The Land, a sublime offering of abstract electronica where their synergy brings out avant garde musical textures. They’ve performed in a quadra-phonic sound setting with the National Youth Orchestra; Judith Sephuma and Charl du Plessis. When the head of the Open Window School of Film Arts, Pluto Panoussis, asked Israel to do a live performance to a silent film, Vampyr (1932) by Carl-Thedore Dreyer, Israel invited Kobak and Joburg-based musician, Givan Lotz, to collaborate on the score. Lotz and A Hollow In The Land performed the score live with the film at Impac Film Festivals in Centurion and Prince Albert. They will now take the performance to the National Arts Festival in July.
You can hear more of Kobak’s music in the upcoming local film, Ayanda and the Mechanic, releasing later in the year.