#south african music

[ayandagama]

Uncle Waffles

#south african music #black girl aesthetic #black girl moodboard #black girls are beautiful #black women #black femininity #black women in luxury #black girls in luxury #south african women #fashion #clothing #south africa #wocsource #wocedit #woc beauty #wocdaily #woc #melanin beauty #melanin goddess #melanin poppin #melanin #black beauty #black woman appreciation #black girl magic #black tumblr #pretty black girls #black girls rock #black goddess #black girl fitspo #black girl luxury

[shy-girl04]

The achingly beautiful Bongeziwe Mabandla

#bngeziwe mabandla #african music #music #Youtube #Spotify #south african music

[electroquirkmusic]

Sdlodlo, 1985: “Ngisebenza Kanje” electro pop in Zulu

#80s music #South African music #Youtube

[symphoniclove]

Tyla Self-Titled Debut Fan Art Cover

#tyla #tyla seethal #album cover #fanmade cover #album fanart #fan artwork #afrobeats #amapiano #south african music #debut album

[11oh1]

#music #new music #South African music #amapiano #afrobeats #uncle waffles #yahyuppiyah #pcee #eeque #chley #uk music #london #boiler room #tanzania #azake #major league djz #lady du #tony duardo #justin99 #musica #african music #been waiting for this #playing this all summer #summer music #Spotify #pmusic

[letsgetmessi]

Last month’s top 50 on Spotify.

#music #receiptify #spotify #beyoncé #latto #glorilla #arya starr #spotify should give us the monthly recap option. they need to catch up #rap #afrobeats #amapiano #south african music #young stunna #kabzadesmall #mt joy #zach bryan

[thesinglesjukebox]

DLALA THUKZIN, ZABA & SYKES - "IPLAN"

Amapiano is probably our most consistently high-scoring genre. Joshua Kim explains how it's evolving...

[8.25]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: The greatest musical development in South Africa this year was 3-step, a style of house music coined by Thakzin that bridges AfroTech and amapiano. He isn't the first to have made songs in this zone (the earliest I've found is Prince Kaybee & Nokwazi's "Ebabayo" from 2021), but he did produce numerous tracks that made him its current poster boy. The genre's most clear, defining feature is the presence of a kick drum on the 1, 3, and 4 of a measure (and less commonly the 1, 2, and 3), which grants each song a more rigid foundation than the typical amapiano track. It's a perfect fit for Dlala Thukzin's "iPlan" and its hopeful lyrics. Zaba sings about not having money or a job, and his voice weaves in and out of the song, like the still-small voice inside your head that tells you to stay calm. And really, it's only fitting that "iPlan" functions as an EDM song without an all-consuming drop; what arrives instead is steady, comforting relief. Its clanging percussion has felt like a multitude of metaphors to me: the pounding beat of your heart, a sign that you're still alive; the sound of repetitive toil, like the promise of something coming from all your hard work; even a desire for reprieve amid life's constant suffering. Here is a song that acts as an invitation to grieve and to celebrate. The beat keeps going, and as I look back on another year, this serves as a nice reminder that somehow, miraculously, I'm still here too. [10]

Micha Cavaseno: I hit a place of personal burnout somewhere in the mid 2010s with the different regional dance scenes of the world made available for all of us by the internet breaking down geographic restriction. Part of it was the fast & loose fashion mentality that made sub-genres go from underrated to overrated within a span of mere weeks, and how any artist could go from essential to disposable before you'd truly had a chance to digest it. To this day, plenty of lingering questions haunt me: did I "miss out" when bubblin' was a thing (maybe)? Was Zomby right to get banned from a message board because people thought bassline and niche were the same (yes)? Did Resident Advisor's coverage specifically get worse when they eliminated the comment section and thus prevented proangelwings from lighting their ass up all the time for pedestrian summaries (no, but it didn't help)? Now I look at an artist like Dlala Thukzin and sigh that I can't in any good faith claim to have a real comprehension of the differences between gqom, afriampo, afrotech, kuduro, kwaito, so on and such... Though I know that it's there, and I need it in order to know what makes a song like this particularly good beyond how muscular yet gentle it is. It's great to admire something for spectacle, but I would like to know the brilliance (or even the clunkiness) of form one day. [8]

Ian Mathers: There's a pleasing graininess to some of the synths here that remind me of other amapiano I've heard, but I'm less familiar (but still taken) by the stiff percussion that sometimes sounds like it's slightly phasing in and out. Both play off the high, sometimes keening vocals very well. The end result is both propulsive and, especially on headphones, subtly disorienting - it can make your head feel like it's swirling. And I haven't even tried listening to it baked yet! [8]

Kat Stevens: Like finding a couple of ibuprofen in the drawer when you were looking for codeine: grateful they exist but missing that extra oomph. [7]

Katherine St Asaph: In isolation, this is a bit too muted for a desensitized tension-enjoyer like me to be drawn to. I'd probably love it in the right DJ set. [7]

Michelle Myers: Romanticized melancholy works beautifully in dance music. I want to cry in a club to this. [9]

David Moore: Just when I start to have a handle on some of the formal characteristics of South African dance music, it evolves again into 3-step. Thakzin describes adapting his AfroTech sound, broadly popular with international audiences, to South African audiences during the amapiano zeitgeist and hitting on a novel formula that involves a three-beat pattern. Anyway, that's as best as I can understand or describe it. Dlala Thukzin -- not to be confused with Thakzin (as the interviewer in the clip above jokes, but you should absolutely listen to Thakzin, too) -- created a wildly popular take on this sound, which ruled the South African charts for months starting in September. [8]

Nortey Dowuona: Zaba was hijacked, injured one of the robbers and escaped with his hand stabbed in June of this year. 3 months later this song goes number 1 on the Official South African Charts. Somebody was praying for that fool. [10]

Will Adams: Over the course of my dilettantish experience with amapiano, I've come to expect a few qualities: a) impossibly gorgeous; b) a luxurious slow build that carries the risk of; c) never fully reaching a destination. "iPlan" possesses all three, but has a bit more of Column C than usual, which keeps it at a mild distance. The low-mixed vocals might be to blame. [6]

Brad Shoup: I love how pensive this is, how Dlala Thukzin submerges the vocals until they're barely visible from the surface. It resists any easy soar the whole way through: a fantastic transition track, I'd imagine. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Less a song, more a full night on the dancefloor compressed into six minutes -- some artists' entire careers have fewer moments of transcendental jubilation than "iPlan." There's this tea kettle noise that Dlala Thukzin works in the second time Zaba & Sykes go through that chorus that feels like ascension -- and then the song keeps going for three more minutes! [9]

Frank Kogan: Halfway through a People's Pop Poll, when we've finally gotten through the quallies and into Round One, Tom will grab a sentence from every track's YouTube comments and tweet out four of them at a time, one for each track in a heat. Often he'll find comments that are hilariously obtuse, though sometimes they're poignant and evocative. Anyhow, for Emma Bunton's "Free Me" (you probably knew Emma as "Baby Spice") the YouTube comment that Tom lifted was, "It's very soothing and edgy." I stared at this for a minute's worth of nervous self-recognition and then tweeted back, "'It's very soothing and edgy' are what half my reviews come down to." So "iPlan" is cutting up beats in a way that pushes beyond amapiano but is also digging back into late '10s gqom, which is edgier and more driving and more gripping hence more soothing than amapiano, so's the same 90% overlap you get in amapiano's typical soothing-edgy Venn Diagram, but with a bigger circle. Is about dogged determination, is about gliding dance moves across shards of glass, dark beauty, sharp beats. [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox ]

#dlala thukzin #zaba #sykes #music #amapiano #south african music #music writing #music reviews #music criticism #the singles jukebox #Youtube

[nofatclips-home]

D E S I R E, a film by  Adriaan Louw starring Desire Marea

#music #south african music #desire marea #documentary #video #art belikov #adriaan louw #julie vergez #sandile mhlongo

[joemuggs]

Albums of 2023 part 2

And so, on from part 1, we continue. This is more dreamy synth-dub that sits perfectly next to the Harrow album: Richard Norris is another artist with an extraordinarily long and illustrious career but who also has never lost the exploratory urge and total delight in sonic finesse.

Honestly Uruguayan-in-Ireland Lila Tirando a Violeta is right up there with the very best of the "deconstructed club" generation - dark, gothic, complex, VERY WEIRD - and this collab with Berliner Sin Maldita is up there with her best. It's really, REALLY intense!

Just impossibly beautiful elegies from ambient harpist Mary Lattimore which builds towards the final track collaboration with Slowdive's Rachel Goswell that is so lovely it will single handedly bring back swooning as a popular pastime.

Officially an EP but there's enough here to cement Nia Archives's place as a heavyweight - add "Off Wiv Ya Headz" and that Jorja Smith remix, and she's had a humdinger of a 2023....

Saw some discourse suggesting that Burna Boy is resting on his laurels here, but I don't hear it. Maybe it's the fact that the cover looks dashed-off? But musically, this bangs: it expertly joins so many dots but keeps his voice and personality right at the heart of it.

I mean come on there was no way a collab between Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist was going to be anything but good, right? Just purest essence of deep and dreamy stoner hip hop. Yet another small (27min) but beautifully formed album - definitely a trend there.

Feels kind of (literally) sacrilegious to say I prefer Cleo Sol's more personal, less scriptural records (e.g. Rose in the Dark) - and this is, top to bottom, a gospel album - but the conviction to her performance and the whole realisation of it here is still really magical.

From Coventry via Skopje, man like NOT_MDK's first album in 23 years, and he's zooming into the deep flows that join grime and dubstep into the longer, deeper electronic funk continuum... These tracks are so crisp and crunchy!

She's from Turkey but Ahu's been plugged into the London Plastic People / NTS / etc scene for years - file this with Yazmin Lacey and similar LDN soul-jazz, also it's very Boho and vibesy and incensey, definitely one to light your best candles for.

Can't remember who put me on to this, possibly Radio 3? Anyway if cold wet misty Scottish hillsides are your jam Claire M Singer has you covered - these slower-than-slowly unfolding organ-led pieces practically smell of wet moss, and are extremely beautiful.

He's lent vocals to a who's who of electronic music, but it turns out Paul St Hilaire's own studio craft is the equal of just about any of them - this is just a stunning, ocean-deep album of dub abstraction and subtly potent lyricism.

Icelander Eva Jóhannsdóttir aka EVA808 has already made a name in the dubstep/grime world but this is her really spreading her creative wings. Mad psychedelia, elemental abstraction, movie-theme composition - there's not much she can't do. Big things beckon!

There's still SO much to say about amapiano, and so much incredible UK, SA and wider world stuff last year (this isn't even the only great DJ Maphorisa album - he had THREE out in 2023, including a mini album with Shino Kikai and a 25-track one with fellow originator Kabza De Small!!). Suffice to say this has gorgeous songs, primal grooves, endlessly sophisticated mixdowns and bass that'll take your breath away.

Just gonna link to my review for this one (it's got the music embedded) - but TL;DR Darren J Cunningham aka Actress is the holy prophet of the era of enshittification, yet for all that his music is constantly "off" and made for a world that is "off", he alchemises it into real gold.

Yeah I'm going to be THAT space-jazz hipster and say this is the record I wish Andre3000 (who is on it, and Carlos Niño co-produced his album) had made. It's just a more lavish, free, FUN way to cavort with the five-dimensional fractal machine elves.

Zoning in on the platonic breakbeat mathematics that underly Jersey / B'more club Chicago hip house, UK rave, trip hop etc, Bored Lord could seem arch or retro if her beats weren't so gloriously functional and bumping.

Fed up of generic records? You will never EVER find another one that sounds like IFS MA. Polish abstract slightly Autechre-y footwork / drum'n'bass with Japanese rapper MA sounding like a cyborg beat poet Taliban Trim and I.... 🤯

Every man jack and their dog are doing high bpm retro rave lately but you can trust Meemo Comma to put a fresh and uneasy twist on it. These tracks will get you proper buzzing up loud! I got to DJ for her live performance of this at Spiritland earlier in the year, hearing them on that system was a real treat.

You get a twofer with this one. Phil Kieran's ode to Belfast is gorgeous in studio form here, but he also recorded and released a version with the Ulster Orchestra that single handedly revivifies the idea of electronic music done classical style!

Two true underground troupers teaming up here - Jordan GCZ from Juju & Jordash and David "Move D" Moufang with some otherworldly good-dream ambient, deep house and space-soul jams heavy on the Fender Rhodes, fuzzy reverberation and sensually sweeping portamento.

My musical safe place for so much of this year. Brooklyn "electronic jam band" Purelink somehow burrowed into electronic music history and found the softest, happiest, warmest fur lined chamber and then invited us in. I cannot emphasise enough how LOVELY this record is.

More modular synth grooves from E Ruscha aka Secret Circuits, but no over-indulgence here and the grooves REALLY DO GROOVE. Trippy as a weasel circus and twice as funky.

Talking of trippy, here's Optimo Music's second acid-drenched entry, from the man formerly known as TB Arthur and the mighty Magda trading as Blotter Trax, it's a kind of parallel universe early 80s alt disco where everything gurgles and melts.

More from South Africa - King Mzaiza Sound via the reliably tough Parisian PSSNGR label - not 100% sure what you'd call this though it definitely has some gqom sonics, some trap drums, and some strident rap vocals... It's HARD AS NAILS is what it is.

EVEN HARDER - Nyege Nyege brought us a sampler of this (and I don't use mental health language lightly) FUCKING MENTAL shrieking, raging, solvent-huffing sound from São Paulo stewarded by the young DJ K, and it's extremely funky and scarily thrilling.

OK there we go, part three is here.....

#music #acid house #alt disco #dub #modular synth #psychedelia #South African music #amapiano #gqom #rap #stoner rap #hip hop #odd future #ambient #electronica #Japanese music #polish music #experimental rap #grime #drum'n'bass #footworking #deep house #breakbeat #rave #jungle #soundtrack #belfast #london #space jazz #Icelandic music

[brownsoul]

via: Instagram

#black gold #black boys #Jozi #SouthAfrican #johannesburg #brownskin #mzansi #blackboymagic #Melanin #Locs #locstyles #handsfree #handsome black men #black men #south african music #southafrica #cape town #african men #Spotify

[iamidentical]

Recently rediscovered my love of South African band The Flames (or, later, the Flame)!

They were one of the most successful groups in South Africa during the 60s, topping the charts for 14 weeks with their version of "For Your Precious Love" in 1968.

Their classic line-up was the three Fataar brothers Steve (guitar and vocals), Brother (bass, real name Edries), and Ricky (who was only nine years old when he began drumming for the group) and singer and guitarist Blondie Chaplin.

They moved to London and were discovered there by the Beach Boys. They recorded one album on the Beach Boys' own label before breaking up. Ricky and Blondie joined the Beach Boys for a couple of years!

The Flames made some killer music and in my opinion, they never got as much international attention as they should have.

The Flame, L-R: Ricky, Steve, Brother, Blondie

#Spotify #i'll be posting some pictures of the flame for a couple of weeks #i really love this band and their story #the flame #the flames #ricky fataar #steve fataar #brother fataar #blondie chaplin #60s music #70s music #south african music #beach boys

[ayandagama]

Kay Yarms

#south african music #black girls are beautiful #black girl moodboard #black girl aesthetic #black women #black femininity #black women in luxury #black girls in luxury #south african women #black women are beautiful #fashion #black woman appreciation #black woman beauty #black woman aesthetic #soft black girls #soft black women #soft aesthetic #wocsource #wocdaily #woc beauty #wocedit #women of color #black girls #melanin #woc

[magicalmysterymix]

South African Alternative R&B Mix by Nnashe Feat. Nnashe, Te’Amo, Earldridge, Cindii M, Zri, Scarface Panda, Petalz, Iam6teen, Nezi... “Welcome to some of South Africas best up and coming contemporary rnb and alt artists. Some of my favourite underground emerging artists are on here artist like Earldridge that I’ve had the honour of working with and artist like Cindii M who’s music is some of the greatest stuff I think is coming out of the Neo Soul Rnb community. There’s also some representation for producers in the mix very talented guys like Iam6teen , jiggy stapes who’s featured and worked on most songs on the tape. Some other producers are yolophonic, elizée, scarface panda...”

[kaleidoscopeprhyme]

Tyla to the world. 🇿🇦🇿🇦🇿🇦

#tyla #south african music #beautiful south african women #south African women #beautiful women #amapiano

[soundgrammar]

Mahotella Queens

#Mahotella Queens #South Africa #music #South African music #African music #world music

[999-trilla]

Black Paradise Out Now🔥https://on.soundcloud.com/5jPpH

Ey its that time y'all 🖤🔥 *Black Paradise Feat. 3soterick is out*Link In Bio Facebook users right here : https://on.soundcloud.com/5jPpH *Banger Alert🖤🤞🏽 stream and let's spread the word💯😤*

#new music #streaming #so hot 🔥🔥🔥 #music #soundcloud #rapper #hip hop #rap #rap music #south african music