With thick-thumping log drums and skittering synths, “Yaba Buluku” became an instant hit, a song needed at a time when the world was recovering from the lockdown, something to dance to, the perfect timing. The remix with Burna Boy changed the trajectory of the song, Burna’s presence unified two African sounds and tailored the song for the genre’s growing mainstream audience. Behind the pulsing bass lines were DJ Tárico, Nelson Tivane, and Preck. A trio that has stayed loyal to their style, proudly representing Mozambique’s music tradition and blending it with a vibrant strain of South African house music, a successful test that birthed their debut album DONSA. Born in Maputo, Mozambique, the trio have been able to draw a system that favors their output.
Tivane and Preck are the songwriters and recording artistes for the group, while Tarico serves as the record producer and sound engineer of the group. Their musical journey has been a challenging one. DJ Tarico joined a boy band when he was 14, they worked at Reginald Studios till they lost a member and had the studio closed down. On a lone path, he fought his way through as a prolific producer. Nelson Tivane’s unique writing skills and delivery as a singer/songwriter made him the perfect fit alongside Preck, together with Tarico, their style copes with Africa’s sound and it’s knock-on emotional effects.
For the iMullar, the music trio talks about the origin of their name, their debut album which they describe as a pan-African project, and life as a collective.
“YABA BULUKU” sounds like an interesting name, what is the meaning? And the story behind it, alongside it’s relation to your smash hit in 2021? Did the song inspire the name? Tell us all about it.
Yaba Buluku means “something is hitting the pants”, this could be money in the pockets. After this song became a success, fans back home called us the hit Boyz. The song was a last-minute bonus track on DJ Tárico’s album Moz Piano featuring Nelson Tivane and Preck which dropped during the pandemic time when the world was in need of dance on TikTok, this song became viral through the early stages of Amapiano and after this break got into Spotify top viral tracks and the song traveled beyond borders. The song Yaba Buluku made a milestone as one of the biggest global breakthrough Amapiano songs as stated by billboards. The remix of this song gave birth to us coming together as the trio, Yaba Buluku Boyz.
As a group, is it a challenge splitting what has been earned or there’s a balanced understanding?
In our group we are equal, we work equally and split equally except on occasions where our participation in a featured project is not equal then we split according to the level of contributions.
Donsa is a very rich album, in terms of the origins and sounds. At what point did you guys feel the need to create a body of work? And what does the title mean?
Donsa means the force that attracts or pulls attention, so we are that force pulling the attention to discover Mozambique and exposing Mozambique to the world throughout our journey. We first planned to release an EP but as we kept waiting for the perfect time, we kept getting requests for features across Africa so we realized that the continent wanted a piece of us, then we decided to serve a platter by creating a body of work.
What was the creation process like for everyone as a collective and individually, getting the chemistry together to make 15 records, and probably more?
Our music blend is inspired by the influence of the trio’s contributions; DJ Tarico is a producer who is big on electronic dance music, Afro House music, Pandza, House Music, Afrobeats, and Amapiano. Tarico is the brain behind the Beats that drives our sounds. To remain original and innovative, DJ Tarico infuses sounds from across Africa to appeal to a diverse audience that loves dance and energetic music.
Nelson Tivane and Preck deliver the lyrics and performances so that’s how we collaborate to make a whole song. Our set performance is structured the same way, DJ Tarico handles the decks as a DJ while Preck and Nelson Tivane perform the songs and when it comes to dancing, Nelson and Preck come up with the choreography which also includes DJ Tarico dancing to form a 3-man entertainer stage presence. Our creative process differs from most African artists because we perform the songs while recording, we don’t write down lyrics, we discuss it and share the flow of 2 songwriters and 1 music composer and producer who makes all the adjustments to deliver commercial hits.
The feature list is a pretty picky one, was there any intention behind it?
As a pan-African project, the features were strategically picked to cover 3 major languages; English, Portuguese, French, and local African languages like Shangani, Zulu, Yoruba, and pidgin English. Also, artists from different music genres: Didi B – Hip-Hop to Harmonize and Jux – Bongo Flava to Timaya, Shatta Wale, Iyanya, and Liya – Afrobeat. We intentionally created this project to set our footprint in Africa with host Artists that would welcome us to their market as we tour Africa inviting our featured artists to share the stage with us for the culture.
No Sleeping features two Ghanaian artists, DJ Mic Smith & Shatta Wale. How did the collaboration come about?
This came about during the time DJ Tarico was doing a media tour in Ghana and shooting the video of Mr. Eazi “Patek”. He got a call from Mr. Eazi to make another follow-up hit banger “See Something” featuring Shatta Wale. After the song came out, fans were anticipating a Yaba Buluku Boyz and Shatta Wale collaboration since one of the Yaba Buluku Boyz, DJ Tarico, has worked with Shatta Wale. So every time we talked about our upcoming album in the media, we were asked about possible features from Ghana and when we mentioned Shatta the reaction seemed very interesting. So our manager reached out to Shatta Wale for this which he liked the idea and also wanted to be part of the track. We sent a couple of demos and he chose this one and that’s how we got No Sleeping on the project. Looking forward to exploring it with a music video and sharing stage with King Shatta Wale.
Across all 15 songs, which one gave you guys a “hard time”, and had you on the ropes a bit?
Billions was the one track that got us back in the studio multiple times because we had to come out of our usual style to create the masterpiece for global domination. On Billions, you will hear Nelson Tivane rapping for the first time and singing in Pidgin English “When I get money, I go drive big car” a bit of Yoruba, and a rap verse in English. At the same time, Preck delivered his part in our local dialect Shangani, we went further to look for a French feature to make a full circle since we noticed a fast-paced growing listenership from France via our Spotify account.
Our manager, George Beke flew down to Ivory Coast to go get Didi B on this monster banger to make a crossover hit sound for the culture. Didi B liked the storyline of the track which talks about aspiring to make millions and billions to live the dream life.
