Phillip Tabane and the genius of his Malopo (or Malombo) music indicated their desire to fuse their production sensibilities within a hip-hop framework and reflected upon why they still prefer a bare-bone production set-up when composing their music.Ī floor above in Studio 2, rapper Cassper Nyovest has programmed a drum loop in the tradition of the current wave of 808 kicks and claps making rounds in rap music. I did arrive in time, however, to hear as the production duo Black Motion tracked the progress of their career from the 2010 breakout single “Banane mavoko”, to the current day when it’s not unheard-of for them to be booked for three gigs a night. Why is cutting-edge music in South Africa still largely underground? An even more prolonged meditation about the filters at play in popular culture – or mass consumption as dictated by ‘the man’ – was brewing in parallel. My late arrival on day one turned into a week of pondering what that ingeniously-curated meeting of minds potentially holds for future South African music.
The night-time schedule was filled with club gigs featuring a wide range of electronic music deejays, and these typically went on til dawn threatened to break. Days comprised of lectures from renowned producers and musicians in the morning hours production and recording sessions took up the bulk of the afternoon until late evening.
Participants were flown in from Cape Town and Durban, and Jozi had its lot thrown in. Over the course of five days, Redbull decked out the Alexander Theatre in Braamfontein with nifty music-making gear and then hand-picked some of Mzansi’s most forward-thinking musicians to come and play with it.