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On a crisp Thursday morning hours before Desire Marea<\/a>\u2019s performance at the Transform Festival in Leeds, England, earlier this month, the South African songwriter sat in Kirkstall Valley Nature Reserve, communing with his Zulu ancestors. It\u2019s a practice he honed through his training as a sangoma, a traditional spiritual healer, and it is essential to his craft.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s no music if my ancestors aren\u2019t invited and honored,\u201d Marea, 32, said in a video interview from his hotel room later that morning. Quick with a smile and clad in a simple gray T-shirt and plain shorts from the South African designer Lukhanyo Mdingi\u2019s 2023 collection, Marea was far more soft-spoken than he is onstage, where his high-drama performances and penchant for experimental fashion speak loudly.<\/p>\n Marea sings in English and Zulu; his music melds styles (funk, Afrobeat, electro, experimental pop) and traverses topics including queerness, Zulu culture and history. His 2020 debut, \u201cDesire,\u201d<\/a> was a solo album of pulsing, burbling synths and beats. Its follow-up, \u201cOn the Romance of Being,\u201d<\/a> featured a 13-piece band bringing urgent, jazzy compositions to life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n On Thursday, Marea will release \u201cThe Baddies of Isandlwana,\u201d a propulsive three-song EP that encompasses his ambitious creative scope: Its title refers to an 1897 battle in the war between the British Empire and the Zulu Kingdom; its sounds were inspired by his search for identity in the nightlife of Amandawe, a small township south of Durban; and its lyrics imagine the lives of queer Zulu soldiers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Born Buyani Duma, Marea grew up in Amandawe, and like many Black South Africans of his generation, his childhood was affected by the political unrest of the \u201990s. When Marea was only a few months old, his father went missing in the midst of protests in Durban and was never found. His mother supported his early appetite for performing, accompanying him when he appeared in an ad campaign for a carpet company: \u201cShe knew then that I was a star,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n When she died in a car accident six years after his father\u2019s disappearance, grandparents, aunts and uncles helped Marea follow his dreams and attend a fine arts school as a teen, where he initially planned on studying drawing.<\/p>\n After trying his hand at visual art and then fashion, Marea discovered the power of music, and began operating under his stage name: Desire allowed him to embody \u201cthe carnal energy of creation,\u201d while the Zulu word Marea, he explained, \u201cis the ocean, the tide, the star of the sea.\u201d He also began teaming with a friend, Fela Gucci, as Faka. The duo produced an explosive take<\/a> on gqom, a South African genre that combines elements of classic Chicago house and traditional African rhythms.<\/p>\n Through their performances, photography and an inclusive club night, Faka explored queer identity, African art heritage and free expression. The project \u201cwas a cultural reset in the fashion and music space,\u201d the South African singer Zo\u00eb Modiga wrote in an email. \u201cIt was spellbinding, it was new, it was a frenzy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The South African designer Thebe Magugu, who went on to collaborate with Marea on looks for photo shoots, heralded Marea\u2019s merging of \u201chis heritage, culture and spiritual journey together with his queerness,\u201d in an email. \u201cSeeing people interrogate themselves so freely reminds us to do the same,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n Marea said Faka was powerful, but only the beginning. \u201cWe had a responsibility to serve our people, to serve Black, young, queer Africans, by putting ourselves out there, being visible, and saying all that we needed to say with the conviction that we said it with,\u201d he explained. \u201cBut there was something propelling me to answer this call, to give the world this music.\u201d<\/p>\n He started having vivid dreams; in one of the most striking, he saw visions of himself as a sangoma. A powerful figure with roots in the Xhosa and Zulu traditions, sangomas have fulfilled a variety of roles over time, including spirit mediums and practitioners of traditional medicine.<\/p>\n \u201cMusic was my first teacher of matters of the spirit and how to receive messages, but in 2020 I was told it goes beyond being a musician,\u201d Marea said. He noted that had been \u201cfeeling strange\u201d for perhaps 10 years. \u201cI knew there was something I needed to get, a level of actualization that only comes with undergoing initiation.\u201d<\/p>\n Marea spent seven months training to become a sangoma, and while stereotypes of hyper-masculinity can pervade traditional spaces, he found quite the opposite. \u201cI trained with a lot of other queer sangomas \u2014 almost as if queerness was a spiritual condition,\u201d he said with a warm laugh. \u201cFrom what I understand, it\u2019s a very known thing, but even our ancestors support it. I don\u2019t have homophobic ancestors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Daniel Miller first heard Marea\u2019s music around that time. As the founder of Mute \u2014 a label known for releasing works from electronic acts like Erasure, Depeche Mode and Goldfrapp \u2014 Miller quickly recognized Marea\u2019s musical innovation. \u201cI\u2019d never signed an artist before without actually meeting them, but we met on Zoom over a few occasions and really hit it off,\u201d Miller said on a phone call from his home in the United Kingdom. He was delighted that Marea \u201cdidn\u2019t sound like anything else on Mute at all, anywhere close.\u201d<\/p>\n Newly initiated as a sangoma and signed to an international label, Marea set to work on what would become \u201cOn the Romance of Being,\u201d released in April. The influence of South African electronic elements like gqom and its more lounge-y sibling amapiano remained, but he added a band stacked with mainstays in South Africa\u2019s thriving experimental jazz scene, including the keyboardist Sibusiso Mashiloane and the bassist Portia Sibiya, as well as the writers and producers Thuthuka Sibisi and Sanele Ngubane.<\/p>\n For Ngubane, Marea\u2019s role as a healer permeated the creative process. \u201cThe signs were very clear that he has a strong calling and witnessing him before and after his transition, it all makes sense now,\u201d he wrote via email.<\/p>\n Many of the \u201cOn the Romance of Being\u201d musicians returned for \u201cThe Baddies of Islandlwana,\u201d three tracks that explore a visceral sonic landscape. If the LP is \u201can offering to my ancestors,\u201d Marea said, the EP is \u201cmore an offering to myself.\u201d<\/p>\n The new songs originated at a moment when he had returned to Amandawe after a period away. \u201cI was surrounded by all these Zulu men, and I was like, \u2018Who am I now? Historically, who was I then?\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Marea found himself envisioning the Anglo-Zulu war and imagining what queer life must have been in that time of physical conflict and stoic masculinity. The resulting music \u2014 with gleaming horns, churning percussion and chant-like breaths \u2014 is electrifying. \u201cWhat if God doesn\u2019t know?\/What good is it to know?\/What good does it serve?\/Are you really at peace if you know?\u201d he sings on \u201cIf You Know,\u201d<\/a> as the smoldering track boils over with stabs of trumpet and crashing cymbals.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI will dream of melodies,\u201d Marea said of his deep connection to the music. \u201cSometimes it\u2019s a bass line, sometimes a drum line, sometimes a vocal melody. Whatever they\u2019re sending me, I will go and recreate that to my best ability.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a conviction now,\u201d he explained, \u201cbecause it feels like I\u2019ve figured out who I am as an artist and as a human being.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n