If you’ve spent any time in Cape Town’s live music circles over the past few years, you’ve probably ended up at 35 Loop Street. The KAYA Café — now operating as KAYA HQ — has quietly become one of the most consistent launchpads for emerging talent in the city. Not through hype or algorithmic positioning, but through something far less glamorous and far more valuable: showing up, night after night, with intentional lineups and a genuine respect for the artists on stage.
For all the scale and prestige that comes with the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF), what stayed with us most this year was…
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…
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…
Cape Town’s music scene is usually discussed in fragments. The punk kids are over here. The jazz heads are somewhere else. Rap has its…
There’s a particular kind of artist Cape Town produces every few years. Not the loudest in the room. But the kind whose growth feels…
When Cellz stepped onto the stage at The House of Machines last week, it wasn’t just the final Cape Town date of The Voice…
Cape Town’s live circuit has always had a particular kind of magic: a city where the stage can feel like a laboratory, where the…
Cape Town loves to call itself a “creative city,” but the truth is harsher: creativity here often survives despite the system, not because of…
