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Township tech: South Africans raving at apartheid’s afterparty | Musique Non Stop

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Thursday, February 26, 2015

Township tech: South Africans raving at apartheid’s afterparty

A new documentary shows how a country still scarred by years of segregation has embraced locally brewed house music as a force for expression


An apparition rises from the clouds of dry ice billowing through the humid Cape Town air, his pipe-cleaner limbs contorting wildly as he leaps and prances to a drum groove that sounds like hammers battering out a tattoo on a tin roof. DJ Spoko flashes a toothy grin from beneath his scarlet bandana and pokes a skinny finger towards the sky as his comrade Mujava teases out the wonky synth melody from one of South African electronic music’s biggest international hits, Township Funk.


Spoko and Mujava’s pandemoniac display was one of the highlights of this month’s Cape Town electronic music festival (CTEMF), which for the past four years has been seeking to channel the surging energies of the country’s diverse dance cultures and bring some of its disparate creative communities together. Spoko’s story illustrates how young South African producers and DJs have been employing a mixture of DIY inventiveness and entrepreneurial verve to make themselves heard. He started cutting tracks in his township home near Pretoria aged 12, using pirated drum-loop software to create the toughest sound he could. “I just banged those drums. Hard! No bass, just drums – bang!” he recalls. “I hate soft music, I just love noise.”


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by Matthew Collin via Electronic music | The Guardian

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