ESINAM & SIBUSILE XABA

Esinam Dogbatse is a Belgian-Ghanaian multi-instrumentalist based in Brussels. With her artist moniker ESINAM, she creates a musical world of her own, filled with rhythms, grooves, melodies and loops. Solely carried away by sound, ESINAM succeeds in blending her soulful voice with traditional African percussion, adding here and there some electronic influences combined with sensible melodies and flute improvisations. Her compositions carry traces from numerous geographical, cultural and musical influences, which she collected from her personal history and through various travels, encounters, tours and collaborations. On stage, she performs solo — looping instruments and combining samples as a one-woman-band — as well as with her full band (guitar, (double) bass, drums and ESINAM on keys, vocals, flute and samples). After a first, meanwhile sold out EP on Sdban Records (2018), she released her internationally acclaimed debut album ‘Shapes in Twilighs of Infinity’ on September 3rd 2021 via the Belgian cultjazz-label W.E.R.F. Records.

Charismatic guitar savant Sibusile Xaba reframes maskandi and the avant-garde into his own humanist manifesto. With a vocal style that is part dreamscaping and part ancestral invocation, Xaba divines as opposed to plainly singing. Combined with a guitar style that is rooted in expressive picking, Xaba’s music shatters the confines of genre, taking only the fundamentals from mentors such as Madala Kunene and Dr Philip Tabane and imbuing these with a mythology and improvisational intensity all of his own.

In 2018 Esinam discovered Sibusile Xaba during his European (solo)tour. She was enchanted by his musical energy and craftsmanship and invited him as a vocal guest feature on the track ‘Flowing River’, from her debut album ‘Shapes in Twilights of infinity’. When she was asked at the first edition of WOMAD Festival in South Africa if she wanted to collaborate with a ‘local artist’, she didn’t have to think twice. So in October 2022, Esinam and Sibusile seized this opportunity to dive into the rehearsal and recording studio, and discover and combine each other’s musical universes to shape up new music together. Both artists wish to elaborate on these musical seeds that were planted and we hope to harvest together with them the fruits of an intense musical collaboration by May 2023, after a residency in the venue Le Botanique in Brussels.