Dumama Listening Session: Towards an Expanse , Q&A & Fundraiser for Housing Support

Join us for a special evening with Dumama—the South African-born, Berlin-based musician, composer, and sonic poet Gugulethu Duma.
 

For this intimate listening session, Dumama will guide us through her latest album, *Towards an Expanse*, alongside a selection of the music, artists, and sonic traditions that have deeply influenced her practice and way of listening.

Blending voice, storytelling, experimental electronics, and the rare uHadi—a traditional Xhosa musical bow—Dumama’s work moves between ancestral memory and contemporary sound. Her music explores oral tradition, Black sonic archives, spirituality, grief, and futurism through layered compositions and poetic narratives.

The evening will unfold as a shared listening experience: selected tracks, conversation, reflections, and stories behind the music that shaped the creation of her newest body of work. This session will also support Dumama’s current housing support fundraiser, with part of the proceeds from the evening going directly toward this initiative.

Records will also be available for purchase on the night. An opportunity to slow down, listen deeply, and enter Dumama’s expansive sonic world together.

Artist Bio Berlin-based sonic poet and composer Dumama presents her debut solo album, *Towards An Expanse*. “Towards an Expanse” follows the acclaimed 2020 collaborative album “Buffering Juju” with Kechou, a fellow South African musician and artist, which was hailed as the Global Album of the Month and “a wonderfully inventive debut” in The Guardian. At times gospel, at times electro-psychedelic space travel, the project begins with a languid lament that whispers an invitation—close to the ear—up and between the folds of what unfolds into an ever-expanding sonic universe. “Towards an Expanse” began in 2019 at Figure 8 Studios (Brooklyn, NYC) under the generous guidance of Shahzad Ismaily, and has since evolved into a companion—a pulsating vessel of grief, vitality, and reclamation. The album reflects on learning to live with trauma while reclaiming autonomy over how Black life is documented: a dialogue between the artist, her ancestors, voices such as Miriam Makeba, Busi Mhlongo, Princess Magogo, and Madosini, and the psychoacoustics of South African folklore as a timeless technology. It brings these elders into a conversation with Dumama’s global perspective and experimental sensibilities—merging her formative influences with those of contemporary artists such as Sudan Archives, Björk, FKA Twigs, and Pamela Z. The work has been evolving over a six-year period and was incubated and overseen throughout by South Africa–based Andrew Curnow of Mushroom Hour, before being signed to the UK label Soundway Records. It was written in Port Alfred and Cape Town, South Africa, initially recorded in New York City, USA, refined and matured in Berlin, Germany, and completed in Johannesburg, South Africa, where musician and producer Nandi Ndlovu reimagined the 2019 New York City recordings with Dumama during a three-week production workshop that involved Ndlovu sampling and rearranging the New York City recordings, adding various electronic elements (drums, percussion, and basslines), recording additional live musicians, and featuring extensive vocal production by Mushroom Hour’s Dion Monti. Rooted in Black ontological understandings of circular time—where we are here, there, nowhere, everywhere—*Towards an Expanse* mediates realities and excavates the spiritual impulse within, bringing it into the discourse of the present. Produced and arranged by a feminine force (Nandi Ndlovu), this electro-acoustic body of work traverses radical sonic lineages that defy any single genre: future folk, gospel, left-field electronics, ambient, post-punk, and prog-rock, reminding us that we have vast capacity to tap into the infinite. The songs are songs, but they are also extended meditations on non-human listening and the sonic lexicons of anti-imperialist thought concerning grief, love, belonging, and death.