Sauti Sol is a Kenyan afro pop group comprised of Bien-Aime Baraza, Willis Austin Chimano, Delvin Mudigi and Polycarp Otieno.
Sauti Sol have steadily built their career to be known across Africa and the globe. They have had appearances in several festivals like the Southwest Music Festival (SXSW) in Austin, Texas and Boombaataa Festival (2013) in Nairobi.
Most recently, Sauti Sol received two nods at the 10th Annual Channel O Music Video Awards Nominations (CHOMVA 2013), for the hit single, “Money Loverâ€. The song has been nominated in the categories of Most Gifted Afro Pop Video and Most Gifted East Africa Video. Their song “Shukuru†with Tanzanian rapper AY won East Africa’s Most Gifted Music Video at CHOMVA 2012. Sauti Sol was crowned as Artist of the Year at Kenya’s inaugural Social Media (SOMA 2013) Awards.
We had a few questions for them and this is what they had to say:
1. Besides Music what else do you guys do?
Music is everything to us, any other activity outside the studio is still musically oriented but yes individually we do have other things, like personal lives and pursuing personal ambitions like Delvin and Polycarp are both very interested in pursuing music production full time. They are great producers. Polycarp produced Mumala’s Paper Chasing and Delvin – Elani’s first single, Jana Usiku. Music takes 98% of our lives.
2. How do you think the CHOMVA nomination will impact your music?
The nominations come as a blessing especially during a year that we cancelled our European and American tour to focus on our third album, and focus on Africa. Weirdly enough after making this decision the stars aligned and we started getting gigs in Africa and now the nominations.
3. What do you prefer? Facebook or Twitter? Why?
We really don’t prefer one to the other. Both mediums are important to us as they are an important connecter to our fans and also its largely through Facebook and Twitter that we’ve managed to expand our fan base around the world. Kindly follow @SautiSol and Sauti Sol
4. Where do you see yourself in five years?
Wow we wouldn’t want to limit ourselves by saying that maybe God has a different plan for us in 5 years. What we can say is that we have big dreams and where we are right now started as a result of those dreams that are still ongoing. For sure is we see a Grammy somewhere there, we see ourselves on day as one of the biggest bands in the world, we see ourselves changing people’s lives positively through music and also a lot of giving back and oh yeah we see ourselves owning a football team 🙂
5. Any question for us? We’ll publish our answer as well
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
Buying weaves worth 1 million 🙂
6. What would you do if you were president for a day?
Being President for a day wouldn’t be enough to do what we’d each like to do. For that day it would just be enough for have lunch and dinner and probably get the chance to address parliament and tell them wanatuenjoy sana!!
7. What’s your music making process like?
It’s really random, very very random ideas just fly around and now that Delvin and Polycarp are producing we just lay them down and develop from there. But it’s so much fun to get something awesome and new we can’t wait for ya’ll to listen to our third album
8. Who/What inspired you to do what you do now?
People who dare to dream of what is considered impossible and do it. Especially when you look at musicians who had otherwise been written off and told they’d never make it and manage to become some of the biggest global superstars.
9. If you were to change jobs, what profession would you get into? Why?
That’s a tough question because each one of us has a degree in different fields but we still ended up with music, maybe in another life or parallel universe we’d each be something else but for now its music music music.
10. If you had a superpower, what would it be?
Reading and changing people’s minds.
11. If you were deserted on an abandoned island what 5 things would you want to have?
The four of us and a guitar. That constitutes 5 no?
12. You are considered to be among the best artists in Kenya because you do both recording and live performances well. What advice would you give others who want to perfect both areas?
Practice practice practice. Figure out your inner self, your weak points, your strong points and work on building on that.
13. If you could be in any other band in the world, which one would you like to be in? Why?
Metallica..haha.. Watching them and how they have crazy crazy fans and being able to play a concert with 500k peeps now that’s something we’d like to experience.
14. What’s the weirdest comment someone has ever made about your music? What’s your comment on it.
Hmmmm That we should stick to being afro fusion artists, our comment on that is we’re still confused at what it was supposed to really mean. I guess fusin gives us the freedom to delve into many other genres including soul, rumba and benga.
15. Share something interesting about yourself with our readers.
We are very spiritual and big dreamers and believe in treating others as you’d want to be treated. Karma is real.