HEAT Festival Day 5: Wren Hinds Band & Francesca Biancoli

Warmth. Longing. Acceptance. This was the message of the second last night of the HEAT festival. After all the struggles and triumphs of us and our ancestors, we are left with the realisation that we must keep on loving, see what needs rectifying and keep on moving forward with gratitude.

The lovelorn atmosphere Wren Hinds Band and Francesca Biancoli created felt like the hugs we forget to give ourselves. Although the groove was heavy, the melody was soothing. And as all the performers centered the night around their own vulnerability, you could not help but give your total attention.

Photography by Luke Swanepoel

“In the dream state,

not a bad place to fade away… ”

Wren Hinds made way for the warm flow of the evening. With him on stage was guitarist Dylan Fine, bassist Maurice “PASH” Paliaga, and the dangerously groovy Jonno Sweetman. These four held together music that felt ever-evolving, speaking to that part of us that tells us to keep moving. Although I was enthralled by the new discovery of the band, the track that stayed with me was Dream State, the 7th track on his 2023 album Don’t Die In The Bundu. This album is a sanguine meditation on the journey of fatherhood and perseverance.

There was an ease to how the four of them moved together, the kind that only comes from years of playing together. Sweetman's drumming never rushed the room, even when the groove thickened; Paliaga's bass sat low and warm underneath everything, with us feeling rather than hearing it; and Fine's guitar lines curled around Wren's playing rather than competing with it. It didn't feel like a frontman and a backing band so much as four people having the same conversation from different perspectives. Wren himself barely needed to perform with any intensity - he simply stood in it, surrendering himself to the music, fading away.

Photography by Luke Swanepoel

I read somewhere that the birth of a child is the birth of a parent, and this I think Wren made evident with this project. The entire album makes you feel like Wren is awakening to a reality bigger than himself, and we are allowed to observe that through sound. 

The album, both in its cover and themes, feels like Wren honouring his parents. Raised in Ramsgate on the KwaZulu-Natal coast, music and art seems to have been embedded in his home - his father Kevin Hinds recorded for EMI and Gallo in the 1970s and his mother Diane Erasmus paints landscapes. You could hear that inheritance in the set as well - a kind of patience that was passed down, songs that don't rush toward their message but trust you'll still be listening even if there is no promise of them arriving.

Photography by Luke Swanepoel

“In our wonderland,

we reach our dreams… ”

By the time Francesca Biancoli stepped up, the room had already accepted that being vulnerable was the only way to continue throughout the night. Where Wren's set moved like a wave, hers moved like a breeze -  patient, unhurried, letting silence sit in the room before filling it again. She has an unforced control of her voice and she allows it to reach the highest and deepest of her being. 

Biancoli was born in Bari, in the south of Italy, and trained formally in jazz vocals before a scholarship first brought her to Cape Town over a decade ago. She's spent years folding herself into this city's jazz circles, sharing stages and studios with some of Cape Town’s most respected musicians, and you could feel that familiarity in how loose, yet familiar, the band felt behind her.

Photography by Luke Swanepoel

What struck me most was how personal she made the performance feel without indulging herself. Between songs she'd offer a line or two of context - enough to orient you,to see where she is coming from - and then let the music take you wherever she was going. In opening the door herself, and then trusting the room to walk through, we heard Francesca’s authenticity beyond what her voice could say.

There's a thread that ran under both sets, even though the two artists arrived at it from completely different places. Wren's album sits with fatherhood, and accepting patience as something that stands outside of time. Francesca's newer material has been moving toward questions of womanhood and reclaiming your voice from wherever you’ve hidden it - both circling the same idea: that growing up, in the truest sense, means learning to hold both tenderness and resolve at once.

Photography by Luke Swanepoel

By the closing songs, the H.U.B Gallery didn't feel like a venue anymore. It felt like a room full of people quietly agreeing to be a little more honest with themselves before they walked back out into the cold. It's the kind of show that reminds you why HEAT exists in the first place - not performances, but people making way for the truth, and a room willing to sit with it.