Connected

Despite living thousands of kilometres apart, South African DJ Kid Fonque (born Allan Nicoll) and the UK’s Jonny Miller connected over 10 years ago through a deep shared love of music and their respective scenes, and Connected represents the best of both of their worlds. “The more we got into the record, the more we started to want to tell a story about our connection to South Africa and our strong connection to the UK electronic music scene, which we're both very passionate about,” Kid Fonque tells Apple Music. Crafted during both countries’ 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns, the music leans heavily on the South African vocal talent they’d discovered over the years to create an album that’s both unique in its sound and strong in its identity. The album artwork, created by artist Zito Mowa, features both artists’ faces boldly illustrated against a bold backdrop, and signals a shift for Kid Fonque’s Stay True Sounds label, using Connected as a way to introduce a new look and feel for the collective in 2021. Here Kid Fonque and Jonny Miller talk us through the 12 tracks that allowed them to call their ideas together. Connected Beings (feat. ASAP Shembe) [Intro] Kid Fonque: “We decided to create a theme around the record through European electronics and South African vocalists. I briefed vocalist Sio and explained to her the vision of the record, and if she could put that into words. I didn't want Sio to do another poem because she was all over our previous record, so we got ASAP Shembe to speak her poetry because we love working with ASAP, too. It sets the tone for what's going to happen over the next hour.” Inertia (feat. China Charmeleon) Kid Fonque: “China Charmeleon is one of the most exciting producers to come out of Stay True Sounds, and South Africa, in the past year. He ran a record label from Mpumalanga with fellow musician Andile Andy, and they kept releasing music, but they didn't really have people listening and he was getting to the end of the road; there have been a few interviews where he talks about being on the verge of committing suicide. Fortunately, the stars aligned and I played one of his records on my radio show, Selective Styles on 5FM, and it exploded. He's a multi-instrumentalist, he can sing, he can produce, and I'm his biggest fan. For this, we sent him something that didn't really work, and he sent us something which we reproduced and came up with ‘Inertia’.” Keep It Jozi Kid Fonque: “I did an interview on Selective Styles with an Icelandic producer and DJ named Intr0beatz. I thought it would be a very cool idea to add what he said about his experience in South Africa, because it happens to DJs from all over the world—they realise how big our house scene is in this country and how passionate we are. So we cut up Intr0beatz’s interview and him talking about the South African experience of a DJ from overseas and put it on a great house production.” Sarhalel (feat. Toshi) [Isolation Mix] Kid Fonque: “The original version of ‘Sarhalel’ appears on our four-track Output EP we put out in 2020. Jonny and I reworked this new version for the album. ‘Sarhalel’ means ‘I want to go to the club and have a drink’ in Xhosa, and when Toshi sang that for us, she was experiencing just that. So we got her true feelings about her lack of being entertained over lockdown on this song. It also means ‘thirsty’, but in the sleaziest way.” Afrika Is the Future! Jonny Miller: “We both love tracks with a sort of post-dubstep, breakbeat feel and a darker edge; a more haunting edge. The bassline is very different to any of the other tracks and isn’t traditionally the kind of bassline that you would get in a straight-up deep house tune.” Jaded Jonny: “We wanted to get as many different colours and chapters to the story, and ‘Jaded’ is probably the danciest of the tracks on there. It definitely touches on the electronic tracks that we love and it's got a bit of a Detroit feel to it in terms of the sort of discordant keys that are in there. I want to drop that in a club, but at 3 am.” Tshinela (feat. Fernando & Khensy) Kid Fonque: “‘Tshinela’ means ‘come closer’ or ‘get closer’ in Tsonga, and here Khensy is saying it’s time to get closer as we embark on this new long journey ahead of us. Khensy is phenomenal. She’s classically trained and she knows how to hit those really low notes and then bring it all the way to the top.” Jonny: “This track also features a young, exciting jazz drummer named Fernando. We briefed him on replacing electronic drum elements with live drum elements, but not to just put live drums on there and that's it. It sounds like he's in the room with you.” Sarhalel (feat. Toshi) [Dark Reprise] Jonny: “This was an opportunity to create a bridge but also to allow for breaks in the album. It’s this little moment where we can go deep and dark for a minute, before we move on to the next passage. This creates more of a story, more of a journey. I think as artists we naturally want to tell a story that has dynamics, different atmospheres and different textures the whole way through.” Amaphela (feat. ASAP Shembe) Kid Fonque: “The direct translation of this Zulu word is ‘cockroaches’, but it’s also talking about safeguarding yourself against the roaches in life, taking care of yourself and those who you love, and sometimes even loving the roaches yourself. Also, ASAP Shembe is without a doubt the future of SA hip-hop.” Get. Off. Ya. Ass. Jonny: “The main reference to the broken beat is the actual name of the track, which, if you take the first letter of each word, it spells out ‘Goya’. Goya Distribution, based in West London, was the distribution company that released all the broken beat records—Bittersweet, Main Squeeze. So this is our nod to Goya, which if you’re into broken beat you might spot.” Take Your Time (Interlude) Kid Fonque: “Initially we worked with Jaidene Veda on our single ‘Somewhere’, and then Jonny created this beautiful interlude, which really helps break tracks up and give the album a bit of a pause in between all these electronic beats, and ultimately created ‘Take Your Time’ from ‘Somewhere’.” Jonny: “It became known as ‘Take Your Time’ because that's what we had to do with this. The pandemic forced us to sort of sit on things. Also, there’s a phrase in ‘Somewhere’ where Jaidene says, ‘Take your time.’ It was a happy mistake that jumped out at us as a nice opportunity to revisit ‘Somewhere’ and also to deliver a little message that you can't rush things.” Heartbeat (feat. Sio) Kid Fonque: “We can give Sio a theme and she writes around that, and with this track, the whole meaning, or the production side of the song, was based around the sample where the guy says, ‘The heartbeat is the sound of the drum.’” Jonny: “There's a constant sound of a heart monitor that runs through the whole track. One of the things that we love to do is match the production of the music and the beats to what a singer is actually saying. So Sio mentions the DJ and the DJ’s beats, and in that little stretch of the track, the whole tune literally just drops down to just a single kick drum, to sort of reinforce this idea of a DJ's beats. That sort of connection between what the vocalist is saying and singing, and what we then put into the backing track, becomes quite important and worked very well here.”