Mictacula Has Good INTENTions About Free State Music

With his INTENTions EP, hip-hop producer Mictacula portrays unity in an unnecessarily divided and frail local hip-hop industry, writes Ace Moloi.

The EP, which was originally intended to be an album, brings together various artists – Khahliso M, Iamic, Mimi Rose, Maida Za Kwaito, JAZSTO, Harmonic Squared, Term, Naycha, The ShaSha Twins, Nkox The Leader and Circus Recipe – to create a uniquely unifying Free State sound. Envisaging the project as a bridge building exercise, Mictacula handed it over to a different engineer for mastering. “The idea was to let everyone know that a lot can be achieved through working together. But someone had to do it because for a long time it seemed like no one was willing to take the reins,” he narrates.

Nonetheless, not everyone on the project had the same good intentions, which stifled the project for some years while giving Mictacula space to rethink his strategy. He recounts: “During the recording process of the album, some artists who had finished their songs later had me remove their vocals from the project and some just ended up not finishing their songs. And this now meant that the flow and sound I was going for was starting to become compromised and I just couldn’t hear the finished piece anymore… but the material sounded new each and every time I’d listen to it. It was at this very moment when I decided to create some more music and add it to what was already there so that I could get the flow I was looking for.”

Mictacula owns ’87 Recordings, a Bloemfontein-based production studio that trades in recording, mixing and mastering. His growing profile includes local and national artists like Kwesta, Noxy, Big Zulu, Blacklez, KSet, Kommanda Obbs and Stino Le Thwenny, among others. In addition to teaching sound engineering students and once upon a time being CUT FM’s technical manager, he has also been hired for post-production work on films such as Careers TV’s Molamu – The Fighting Stick, which was commissioned by Multichoice, and also made the title sequence for SABC 2’s Breaking New Ground.

In all this upward mobility, the nerdy producer remains grounded in his deep love for making music that first stirs his own heartstrings before it can move others. “If I can create something that evokes any kind of emotion with the musical tones I use in my productions, then I’ve won half of the battle. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be someone else’s emotions I evoke. It could even be my very own. Because I’m of the notion that if I feel it, someone else will probably feel it too,” he states.

Many people are feeling the INTENTions EP, a feat he acknowledges is more than he imagined. The project crossed a thousand streams on Spotify alone in a matter of weeks. Again, several songs off it have been featured on SABC 1’s Skeem Saam several times. One of his songs, When The 05 Comes Alive (feat. Iamic), is also performing well on the Top 40 charts of Free State’s leading community radio station, Motheo FM 88.5.

To Mictacula, this market reaction is a validation of his musical taste at a time when hip-hop is not as dominant as it used to be. “The EP’s reception could’ve easily gone sideways because it doesn’t sound like what’s currently out right now, but that’s a chance I was willing to take,” he concludes.