Storm clouds crackle and crease, a punctuated thunder. Lightning strikes my eye; lightning strikes my eye. The emerging myth of man and beast. A falcon-headed figure. Ruler of the heavens, the sun and moon both captured in his gaze. Son of Isis and Osiris, conceptually connected to the multi-faceted threads of reality. An ancient deity….
When asked to describe the sound of the Gqom subgenre, DJ Lag doesn’t hesitate- ‘it’s raw and hype.’ Since the beginning of this decade, it has become the defining electronic music to come from Durban and it’s surrounding townships, like Lag’s home Clermont. Gqom takes SA production to a new extreme of brooding intensity. It’s…
“Be like water my friend”. This is one of Taariq Latiff’s favourite quotes. It also exemplifies the way he has tackled the growth of his Cape Town-based design agency, Chocolate Sauce. The story for Chocolate Sauce began when he started doing freelance work in 2009 during his third year at varsity. Two months into his…
As much a cinematographer as a producer, Hlasko’s music spins imagery from sound. “I look at it like films: the setting, the situation, the subject, the object, [all] used in the creation of the song”. For me, the setting for Hlasko’s music is a grey beach, abandoned at dusk. In the distance is a lone…
Glowing in the soft morning Lisbon light, her radiance exudes beyond the digital screen. Laetitia Lotthé voice echoes in Parisian lilts. Embodying a cross-cultural experience – with a mother from Central Africa and father from France – she moves between spaces with adaptability and ease. Laetitia first experienced Johannesburg at the impressionable age of twelve….
“En as die voels sing, kom daar bink straatjies uit die voels se vertjies.” (And when the birds sing rays of light stream from their feathers.). When asked about why this is her favourite quote, Bronwyn Katz explained that this quote by her grandmother speaks to the ideas she has about voices, the importance of…
Anthony Smith, founder of South Africa’s most befokte clothing label, 2Bop, has always lived by his own rules and he’s proving that you don’t need to buy into the lily-white-old-boys-club-hierarchy of the traditional Cape Town creative industries in order to level-up. As a kid he’d be skating and shooting hoops and skieting games from the…
It’s a special moment when one is given the opportunity to talk with their heroes. I first met Sophie during her exhibition as the main attraction in Mary Sibande’s solo exhibition ‘The Purple shall Govern’ in the Grahamstown National arts festival. Seeing Sophie, a life sized ebony skinned sculpture in Victorian dress, for the first…
Mashaya shows up to Father Coffee just a few minutes late for our interview and he quickly allows me into the landscape of his life these days. He is fresh from AfroPunk in Paris and we fall into step chatting about his experiences in Paris. He is refreshed and ready to work on more music,…
Photographs have become indispensable to our nightlife: there’s no party unless it’s pictured. Amid the lazer beams, and tri-coloured stage lights, is the cacophony of tiny camera-phone flashes, setting off about the crowd. Snapping images is part of what it means to share, enjoy and curate our after-dark experiences. A night on the town clusters…
A few months before Felix Laband dropped his much anticipated Deaf Safari (2015) album, he played an early evening set at the 2014 Sonar Festival in Cape Town. The venue was packed as one of South Africa’s undisputed electronic masters showcased his latest work. The performance was accompanied with his collage artwork, which mixed up…
Three months ago, I shared 90-minutes with Buyani Duma (otherwise known as Desire Marea, of the artist collective FAKA). Encased in a wall of glass at the Newtown Workshop, we moved unusually quickly from strangers’ niceties to buried intimacies. A few weeks later, on a Juta Street corner, Didi Simelane (A.K.A style icon Didi Monsta)…
