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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.

In Event

The people behind the coolest Cape Town music events

July 21, 2026 No Comments

The best Cape Town music events don’t just happen to you. Someone books the room, talks the venue round, pays the sound engineer and loses a week of sleep over a lineup nobody will thank them for. The DJ gets tagged and the venue gets the photos. The person who made the whole thing exist usually stays off the flyer.

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 Event

CTIJF just bet on a whole month. Cape Town should follow its lead

July 7, 2026 No Comments

We were at Youngblood on the last Friday of June, in a room thick with familiar faces, when espAfrika set out what the Cape Town International Jazz Festival (CTIJF) becomes in 2027. Not a weekend. A month.

In Feature

Operation Khataza built the room before they built the record

July 1, 2026 No Comments

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.