Music

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

Cape Town’s culture has lived on Big Tech’s terms for years. The Scene is a bet that it doesn’t have to

October 2, 2026 No Comments

A locally-built app is trying to pull the city’s cultural life out of the global feed and into something human-curated. The idea is overdue. Whether the city shows up is the open question.

Every Cape Town musician knows the maths. You have a show. You try to think of a clever, unique, ‘authentic’ post that will cut through the algorithm. You post it. Then, to guarantee that people actually see the post on the platform where you built your following, you pay. And the audience you are paying to reach sits inside a feed that also wants to show them, in Benji Anstey‘s words, “American bands, British comedians, Japanese politicians, and the world more broadly.”

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 Event

Prevention is more effective than rescue, and Glastonfurry festival is banking on it

September 22, 2026 No Comments

Glastonfurry is comfortably the loudest thing anyone in Cape Town will do for stray cats and dogs all year. On Heritage Day, the fundraiser lands at Woodstock Brewery for its seventh edition, a day of metal and hardcore with BEAST at the top of the bill, every cent going to the Cape of Good Hope SPCA. The noise is the easy part to write about. What happens to the money once the last band packs down is worth noting, and it goes even further than you might expect.

In Feature

Afrikalt is fighting an enemy that can’t arrest you

September 15, 2026 No Comments

If everyone is alternative then nothing is alternative

Damian Strydom doesn’t sugarcoat what it costs to run an independent tour through towns most acts skip. “Funding and sponsorship is a bust. False promises and kak praat. Doen dit jouself!” he says. He has toured this country the hard way with his band Onskuldige Doodsvonnis: played shitty bars, got beaten up by biker gangs, slept in cars. “If you look at the numbers it doesn’t make sense to do it, but it’s taking that risk and that leap of faith and doing it nonetheless.”

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 Event

Feastival got the hard part right

August 25, 2026 No Comments

Feastival’s Cabo Women’s Day edition served up a good night of music. What stayed with us was how safe it felt, and in Cape Town that counts for more than it should have to.

A bride arrived blindfolded. Her friends walked her in, pulled it off, and the group was dancing before she had her bearings. That only happens when a crowd feels safe, and safety was the story of Feastival’s Women’s Day edition.

In Op-ed

Most new music is now made by machines trained on songs no one paid for

August 18, 2026 No Comments

The panic says the machines are winning. The numbers say almost nobody is streaming what they make. The bigger question in South Africa is whose work those models were trained on.

More than half of the music uploaded to Deezer every day is now fully AI-generated. That is the platform’s own figure, roughly 90,000 machine-made tracks a day, more than two million a month. If you have spent time in a Spotify Discover playlist or deep in a TikTok feed lately, you have already met a few. Competent and convincing, catchy even, and made by no one in particular. No one played on them. A prompt and a dataset did the work.

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

What a decade with Dr Madala Kunene taught Sibusile Xaba

July 28, 2026 No Comments

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.