The minute he picked up a guitar neo-soul singer-songwriter Alek Blak knew that being an artist is his destiny.
Born Yamkela Mdaka, Alek Blak is a self-taught musician who began writing his own songs at the age of 13.
Hailing from Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, Mdaka moved to the City of Gold in 2014 to chase his lifelong dream of becoming a musician. Since then, he has released two singles,
“Alek is Yamkela halfway backwards and the ‘Blak’ part of my stage name comes from the very first guitar that I owned which was black… so, Alek Blak is a combination of myself and my partner in crime, the guitar you always see me with,” says the 29-year-old singer.
“When I was growing up I always knew I loved music but I never really thought I could sing or even had a nice voice. But all of that changed when I was at a family church camp and I was trying to remember the tune of a song. I then sang it to my mother and she had this look on her face of disbelief… she then said to me: ‘Oh my gosh, you can sing… you have an amazing voice’– it was at the moment when I was younger than 13 that I started to explore what it was like being a musician.
“That’s when I started teaching myself how to play the guitar and songwriting because I enjoyed writing stories. So, I started writing music and my guitar became the instrument that I used to help support myself in creating music.”
While Mdaka is entirely a self-taught musician, he says that his uncle, his mother’s brother, was the one who showed him the basics of playing the guitar… “this happened way before the existence of YouTube”, says Mdaka.
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From realising that he had a voice that is “enjoyable”, Mdaka found himself navigating into an intentional direction where he honed his singing skills. His creative side saw him majoring in visual arts in high school and joining an agency based at the Pretoria State Theatre where he’d partake in acting workshops every day after school. “Whenever there were rehearsals for a show, I would always bring my guitar with me,” says the passionate singer.
“How I came about conceptualising the idea of Alek Blak was through someone I’d refer to as my first manager or someone who helped discover me which is a casting director and founder of Actor Spaces, Ayanda Sithebe. At the time he became very interested in my guitar because I was always carrying it around… soon as I sang him a song, he felt that I needed to refocus more on my singing than the acting workshops that I was a part of.”
In 2009, Mdaka and Sithebe both went on to shape the image of Alek Blak and the type of music he would sing. After a few years, Mdaka went out on his own to cement his name in the music industry.
“One of my very first shows I did was a one-man show that was written by Tshepo Ratona who’s a director now. He had written this one-hander he had asked me to perform, I must’ve been 17 at the time. I wrote seven songs which was very daunting but the show turned out very well.
“However, after such a successful feat in my life, I took a bit of a break from music to study journalism at Rhodes University. On campus, I was known as the guitar guy who performed at numerous clubs and university events… at some point, I did radio broadcasting as a part of my degree.”
Having dipped his feet as a broadcaster and writer at Destiny Man, Mdaka made sure to concurrently pursue his music career while working in the media world. “Throughout the years, as an independent artist, I have gained confidence in my voice and my sound. Alek Blak has evolved throughout the years. From 2017 to this present day one thing you can notice is the quality of music and the storytelling that hold more context than when I first started.”