Alexander Brand

In Feature

Internet Athi built his career like a startup. Now he’s headlining Artscape.

October 6, 2026 No Comments

When Athenkosi Cetyana, better known by his stage name Internet Athi, left tech for music, he did not picture himself as a singer taking a leap. “I understood that I had become my own startup,” he says. Five years of information-systems work in Cape Town came with him, the funnels and the habit of treating a problem as something to be mapped. Even the album that made his name runs on that wiring. Polymorphism, released on Freedom Day this year, borrows its title from a programming idea, one object that can take many forms.

In Feature

Athie Umgido on what it takes to get a Cape Town artist to Europe

October 1, 2026 No Comments

Athie Mbilini, who DJs as Athie Umgido, has spent this year on stages most Cape Town producers will only ever read about. Awakenings in the Netherlands, a run through Ibiza that took in UNVRS for elrow, weeks of dates across Germany and Portugal. Then he comes home, and the European CV does not travel with him. Some weeks he still opens rather than headlines, because a booking here follows relationships as much as a record.

In Feature

Jabulile Majola returns with second album Ipasi

September 11, 2026 No Comments

On Tuesday night, at Quiet Life Co’s studio in Cape Town, Jabulile Majola and Ross Dorkin, who produced most of Ipasi, sat a small room down and played the album through one song at a time, saying where each came from before we heard it. By the middle of the session the room had gone quiet in the way rooms do when you have their full attention. It is the most moving new work I have heard in a long while, and the feeling in there was real. Most of it is in isiZulu, which I don’t speak, and that only made it hit harder. Nobody was performing it. People just sat with it.

In Feature

The House of Machines is moving five metres into the future

August 15, 2026 No Comments

Cape Town has spent the best part of a decade watching its live rooms go dark. The Assembly, Mercury Live, the Raptor Room, The Waiting Room, the list of city-bowl venues that couldn’t make the maths work is long and well-rehearsed by now. Which is what makes the news out of 84 Shortmarket Street worth sitting with. The House of Machines isn’t closing. After thirteen years, it’s moving five metres across to a bigger space behind the big red door, with a send-off on 15 August the venue is calling “burning down this house.”

In Feature

Meet Kwele, award-winning art director and one of Cape Town’s most curious new DJs

July 14, 2026 No Comments

Most Cape Town DJs come up through club culture. Tshegofatso Kwele (DJ name Kwele) came up through a piano. Before the decks, before the residencies people build their names on, there were drum lessons and a guitar she taught herself, and years of reaching for whatever instrument was closest. That grounding is the thing that separates what she does now from the crowded field of emerging selectors.

In Feature

Operation Khataza built the room before they built the record

July 1, 2026 1 Comment

The Cape Town eight-piece built a devoted live following long before they released a note. Their debut single, recorded at Concept Records, is less a beginning than a record of everything that came before it.

There is a way most emerging acts arrive: a single first, an audience hopefully after. Operation Khataza did it backwards. The Cape Town eight-piece—Sanele Blaai (founder and frontman, performing as uFarrah Khataza) on lead vocals, Jarryd “Chuckie” Alexander on bass, Vuyo Nkasawe on keys, Timothy Fortes on drums, Benji Anstey on lead guitar, Fabian Arries Selote on spoken word, and Lois Flandorp and Mariana “MANA” del Carmen on vocals—has for close to three years been a fixture of the city’s underground rooms: mosh pits, sing-alongs, a crowd that knows the words, without a proper studio release to point to.

In Feature

VERVE turns two and is still keeping Cape Town’s underground alive

June 24, 2026 No Comments

Writing about VERVE Magazine turning two is strange in the best possible way. On paper, they are technically a competitor. They cover the same city, move through many of the same rooms, and care about many of the same artists. But Cape Town’s music scene is not exactly overrun with thoughtful, independent platforms doing the work properly. When another publication makes it two years in this space with genuine care, consistency and taste, the response should not be insecurity. It should be respect.

And VERVE has earned that.

In Feature

The eye-level conversation: Many Ameri on what artists bring to brands, and vice versa

May 26, 2026 No Comments

There is a particular kind of advice that gets handed to emerging artists in Cape Town when a brand finally comes knocking. Soften the edges. Be easier to work with. Make yourself more palatable. It is well-meaning, and it is almost always wrong.

In Feature

Sió spent a decade giving house music its stories. CTIJF is giving her a stage to match it.

March 25, 2026 No Comments

There’s a particular kind of artist South African house music produces every few years. Not always the loudest in the room, nor the name pushed hardest on a lineup, but the kind whose presence feels inevitable in hindsight — as if the music has been preparing audiences for them long before the moment arrives.

For Sió, 2026 is shaping up as that year.

In Op-ed

Cape Town International Jazz Festival is growing into the city’s festival again

March 12, 2026 1 Comment

Cape Town loves music in a way that’s hard to argue with: you can feel it in the pockets of live performance that keep multiplying, in the crowds that show up when something is truly special, and in the sheer range of sounds that can exist in the same weekend. We’re a city of musicians, listeners, and cultural operators who know how to make something happen — even when conditions aren’t perfect.