vuyo viwe is the type of artist who understands creation as a confluence of circumstances, sometimes beyond our control. It’s through surrendering to the unknown that she’s found her point of view, and a deep-seated trust in the esoterica of her practice. How else does one arrive at the mercurial amalgamations of jazz, ambient and experimental electronica that the flautist, vocalist and composer has established as her sound — or at least, one facet of it? “I’ve never only done one thing. So I think it’s just by mistake that it ends up being like an in-between genre-bending or maybe genre-defiant kind of record.” For now, it’s this way of synthesising the many parts that make up vuyo viwe that informs her debut album, there are mirrors everywhere.
When I speak to viwe, she’s just taught a music class at her old primary school, teaching Grade 4 learners how to play the flute. “My old teacher was like, she can’t teach there anymore, so she recommended me,” she explains. “It’s full circle in a way.” It’s a fitting place for our conversation to begin, because viwe is interested in the things we inherit, what we choose to carry from them and what we eventually leave behind. there are mirrors everywhere is an eight-track exploration of those ideas, moving through cycles of nature, grief, transformation and self-discovery.
viwe’s relationship with music began long before there are mirrors everywhere, and not necessarily in the world you might expect from a classically trained flautist and composer. As a teenager during the Tumblr era, she started making covers in her bedroom and uploading them to SoundCloud and YouTube. She and her brother, who is also a musician, would recreate instrumentals using a microphone and GarageBand, with her tastes leaning towards the indie alt-rock circulating online. “At the time I really was listening to, like, The 1975, Nothing But Thieves, Arctic Monkeys,” she tells me, before laughing. “I’m still an alternative girl.”
You can find pieces of that girl all over the album, from its grungy visual direction to the alt-leaning melodies on tracks like “geza”. “I didn’t have one musical identity,” she tells me. Her parents listened to everything from Motown and choral classical music to Seal and Madonna, while her own teenage years were coloured by Tumblr and alternative music. Classical flute training eventually gave way to a deeper engagement with jazz at UCT. All those sounds, it seems, left something of themselves inside her. there are mirrors everywhere reflects these facets of viwe back at her.
viwe tells me that the album was born from looking back at her unreleased material and realising that she needed to put out work that speaks directly to where she is in her life, rather than waiting for “the ideal moment”. “tropic of capricorn” is the oldest song on the album, written years before, and became a springboard for revealing the rest of there are mirrors everywhere. “And because I was in this mindset of putting out music that reflects where I am in life,” she says, “the story of this album was already in the music.”
there are mirrors everywhere cycles through autumn, winter, spring and finally, with “ndalo”, the height of summer. “When I realised that the music that I was writing was reflecting the seasons of the earth, I was kind of doing emotional work at the same time that I was writing the album.” She documented that process through video diaries, fasting and periods of deliberate solitude, including spending New Year’s Eve alone at Youngblood for Strictly Soul before heading to the ocean after midnight.
That introspection was partly informed by what she calls Zimology, the philosophy of musician Zim Ngqawana, whose approach to improvisation centred on knowing yourself rather than simply knowing the charts. viwe recalls the story of Ngqawana being asked what song a band would start with, to which he simply answered: “We start on F.” The point, she explains, is to listen and be present rather than rely on predetermined structures. “What we are rehearsing is how to express ourselves, which becomes the music.”
That philosophy runs through there are mirrors everywhere. The album’s title came to viwe during a tarot reading, when the phrase stuck with her. Its meaning became clearer as the record developed: a meditation on what reflects us back to ourselves, whether through nature, family, ancestry, the body or the seasons.
Perhaps the best example is the title track itself. What sounds like an intricately constructed ambient interlude is actually a voice memo taken from the first few minutes of a rehearsal, with viwe’s bandmates asking which song they’re about to play. Rather than erase those moments, she decided to leave them in. “I was like, you know what? I’m actually not even going to edit that out. I’m just going to keep it in because it’s part of the story. It was a real, lived experience.” For all the album’s introspection, viwe isn’t interested in making music that fits neatly into one category. Her sound brings together South African traditional song forms, orchestral folk, alternative vocal melodies, electronic textures and classical instrumentation, alongside the influence of the uhadi and ngoma.
That refusal to choose between influences is central to what she calls “Afro-esotericism”, a meeting point between African spirituality and philosophy and the esoteric practices she has long been drawn towards. “I’m very much into fate and alchemy and the universe, and general esoteric practices,” she explains. “But then I also really believe in a lot of the traditional practices that we have today. But then I also believe in modern medicine. But then I also believe in therapy. I just have to learn to alchemise whatever cards have been dealt to me.”
It’s perhaps the simplest way to understand there are mirrors everywhere. The album is deeply concerned with inheritance, but it isn’t nostalgic about it. It asks what we receive from the people and places that came before us, what we recognise in ourselves, and what we might choose to change.
And then there is “ndalo”, the album’s final track, where all that heaviness finally gives way to joy. “I don’t really write songs that are anywhere in the flavour of joyful,” viwe admits. “They’re all kind of me being like, life is hard, or I feel miserable, or I feel stuck.” But “ndalo” is different. “I think right now I am very happy.”
viwe has emptied her bag a little, she tells me, and now has room for more musical trinkets. For an artist so interested in cycles, the point is not to arrive somewhere, but to keep becoming.
