kagablog

The rules have changed. So much so, in fact, that they resemble something entirely different to rules and guidelines – the rules have transmogrified into something like ‘connect-the-Fun’ dots, and you can connect into whichever direction you imagine, at whatever metrical velocity. Genre? It was an illusion. Musicality? Twas just a hint. Ever since the digital fretboard and electroid canvas zapped onto the lips and fingertips of previously frustrated muso’s, whispering of uncharted vistas spilling over the edges of maps, Music has become so much more than it used to be. Add to this the exponential and un-checkable explosions of digital media and information, and you have artists who can metamorph at will, time-travel in the blink of a beat (and this while playing the visuals like they’re ringin’ a bell).

Enter SweatX, those coochie-poppin’ slap-and-beat-ticklers whose cult status in homeland belies rising popularity on the other sides of the oceans. Turning their tricks the other way round, glitch-enigma Markus Wormstorm and the irrepressibly merry Spoek Mathambo decided to squeeze the big time before claiming SA. Favourites abroad before they were rumours at home – minds you, that were before they tore up Cape Town’s hiney.

And of course, peering into the Funhouse mirror, all wobbly and a-sparkle, their reflection waves back as Playdoe, a gentler variant of themselves, whose ‘It’s that Beat’ and ‘Pop like this’ is going down all shiny in International clubland. Tongue-in-cheek to SweatX’s tongue-down-throat, Playdoe’s Spoek and Sibot splash down wormholes interconnecting mid-Eighties Hip-Hop, gleamy Electro-Pop and future-something. Sez Sibot: “Playdoe’s sound is a compromise of influences and future vision, it’s Spoek an I pushing each other into new exciting unexplored territory and arriving somewhere between Wine-gum samplers and Peanut butter raps.” What makes Playdoe happy? “A big crowd, a good sound engineer, a nice hotel, a bottle of whiskey, Scotland, Switzerland, Metz and………. dancing like a giraffe”

New Afro-Electro up&comer Gazelle, who joined SweatX on a collaborative European tour in May - “Basically planning to take over Europe with an African cultural coup d’etat” - have just released their ‘Chic Afrique’ album, with a sound founder Xander Ferreira dubs LimPop: “All the sounds I grew up to, from Ladysmith BM to Boney M basically forms part of this influence. The new material that we have been working on for the next album is much more traditionally rooted, something like a Graceland 3000 album…” Touring for ‘Chic Afrique’ kicked off late April nationally, before their European album-launch twirl.

On the Jozi side up there’s the mysterious cerebra of noise and relative Electronic conceits, The African Noise Foundation. Fused around the sound-design of muti-instrumentalist/multi-producer Joel Assaizky (Bunny Chow; Hard Copy) and meta-conducting of AK Thembeka, the Foundation is dedicated to re/locating and exploding Africa’s melodic distortion into song. Check out www.myspace.com/africannoisefoundation. “We promise nothing. We bring the Noise.”

And then there’s the multimediatics of MtKidu, whose graphic-albums trace the NuSeffrican-down-the-Rabbithole adventures of young KleinBaas, most recently through 2008’s SHAKAWON, meshing visual melodies and live comic strips to beats and bleeps, creating new musical narratives to stimulate your ears. Check out www.myspace.com/mtkidu for tracks, comic strips, and miscellaneous fun.

All and all, All be swell in the realms of Seffrican Lectronics!

[edited version first published in BPM magazine May/June]