Viwo Kulati finds her voice

22 Aug 2022 By //  by Alan

After getting a push from her producer [Wilson Okafor], Viwo has finally given in to finding her voice and creating her music since professionally boarding her music career in 2015. Her musical background includes being a backing vocalist for the well-known South African neo-soul extraordinaire Zonke Dikana.

She nurtures her childhood passion that began in Makhanda, a small town in the Eastern Cape where she had an opportunity to study music in high school. Her debut EP, “LOVE”, is her first solo offering and finds its roots in ‘1 Corinthians 13’ which is a Biblical text about love. The Xhosa and English written EP expresses her observations on how people need love

The EP has five (5) tracks. The first track is an introduction which touches on the fact that we are nothing without love. The whole EP is inspired by 1 Corinthians 13 which is the book of love in the bible. It is also inspired by her observation of how people need love. Kulati says, We often put other things on the pedestal forgetting that we are a people that need love, and we are incomplete without love. She further adds that the Bible also says that everything else iyaphela [it ends] but love is eternal. In short, the EP is based on that entire scenario The EP is however not a gospel genre but an RNB & Soul genre.

“With this EP I want people to decide for themselves how they feel about the EP and what messages they are grasping. I don’t have expectations or desired reactions from my audience. However, it would be ideal to create a small community of people who just follow and love my music.” Said Viwo Kulati

Her favourite son in the EP is‘Ungowami’. Speaking to Kulati she said thatshe loves it because it is entirely in IsiXhosa, and she had struggled to compose it as she struggle with writing IsiXhosa. She says it is her favourite song as it helped her conquer one of her lifelong objectives and challenges.

“How it came about? It came about as an idea which was also a chorus in the year 2016. However, I could not finish the chorus because I did not know what I wanted it to sound like. But then I spoke to my producer Wilson Okafor, and we started working on it and the words just came to me and we put it together. From there onwards I fell in love with it.” Viwo Kulati

“For women, my biggest advice is “KNOWLEDGE IS POWER”. Women need to educate themselves about the industry they want to enter and not depend on men to help them climb the ladder as that could be very dangerous,” Kulati concluded.