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The House of Machines is moving five metres into the future

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The House of Machines

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.”

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What a decade with Dr Madala Kunene taught Sibusile Xaba

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Madala Kunene and Sibusile Xaba

Scenes don’t survive on venues and streaming numbers alone. They survive on transmission, one player putting something into the hands of the next, over years, with no certificate at the end of it.

Dr Madala Kunene is the Durban guitarist revered as the king of Zulu guitar, a maskandi-rooted elder who spent decades building a style entirely his own. Sibusile Xaba is a guitarist and singer a generation younger, one of the more adventurous voices working in that tradition today. Kunene took him on as a protégé years ago, and mentor and mentee have since become collaborators. Xaba’s decade alongside him is one of the clearest examples of that we have.

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

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Kwele

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.

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Operation Khataza built the room before they built the record

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Operation Khataza

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.

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

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VERVE Magazine

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.

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