Gabi Motuba at Selective Live

ABOUT

Gabi Motuba featuring: Reza khota on guitar 

and joshua nemaire on double bass.

The Sabbath is a vocal explorative body of work which locates the various influences of Gabi Motuba’s very unique vocal abilities. The Sabbath seeks to explore the implications of ‘violent sonics’ which inform our daily sonic encounters ranging from radio, to church bells to television to city ambient sounds, to gun shots, to screams etc. With The Sabbath and its compositions, Gabi Motuba dares to explore and investigate the various ways the ear has developed over time within such an environment affecting how her voice has developed, been reduced or been affected over time. Gabi Motuba is thinking together with Frantz.

Gabi Motuba is a South African award-winning jazz vocalist, composer and music educator. She studied at a South African University known as Tshwane University of Technology where she majored in jazz studies and graduated with a bachelor's degree.

Over the years she has produced several albums, ranging from jazz to avant-gard to experimental, which include Tefiti-Goddess of creation (her debut album released in 2018), Sanctum Sanctorium (A duo album which features Swiss pianist Malcom Braff released in 2015) and The Wretched (which is a sonic experimentation collab that focuses on the literary text The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon released in 2020). 

Gabi Motuba oscillates between being a performer and being a sound artist which has given her plenty of opportunities for collaborative work around the world. She collaborated with a German based sound artist (Coila Enderstein) in 2021 during her residency at the Goethe Institute and co composed The Violence of Care experimental work. 

In 2021, Gabi was selected as the first Artist in Residence at the South African Soweto Theatre as a music facilitator and educator. The residency afforded Gabi space, support and resources to cultivate concepts and a music curriculum that will also assist in developing the Soweto Theatre Music Tutorial Programme. In 2022, Gabi was selected as part of the 2022 cohort of the Mutual Mentorship for Musicians program which is an international platform created to empower female musicians all over the world through a radical model of mentorship and musical collaborative commissions.

She is currently working on her second album The Sabbath which explores the effects of violent sonics and centers the lived experience of the Native within the ‘Colonial World’ (sighting Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth). Gabi’s vocal style is unique in that she utilizes it as a thinking tool and as a tool which investigates and reveals the affects and position of black beings in the world. She has given presentations on her vocal style and how it relates to colonization in a workshop at the University of Western Cape during September of 2023. 

Doors open from 4pm with Selective Collective DJs and Show starts at 7pm

DIRECTIONS