Cape music picks: August 26 2011

The Gaslamp Killer brings deadly beats to Cape Town, and Ethan Smith leads an eclectic jazz mix.

■ He sports a mean “spaghetti Western” moustache, psychedelic rock T-shirt, denim jeans and sneakers.

Pogoing across the stage from behind his decks, he’s a tornado of Howard Stern-permed tentacles, his dance moves a spastic, punk-rave-hopped reanimation of Animal from the Muppets on acid. He’s underground dance music’s rawest beat revolutionary, the Motherfucking Gaslamp Killer. The Los Angeles-based DJ and producer is a former B-boy who honed his turntable headspace tuning in and dropping out to Massive Attack, Portishead, DJ Shadow, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Pete Rock, DJ Premier, J Dilla and Dr. Dre. When he performs live, he’s liable to drop a brassy Louis Armstrong jazz dirge into a dub-stepped Flying Lotus B-side, splice some of Hendrix’s incendiary psyche rock into a glitchy mix of some of Dr. Dre’s vintage G-funk, or mainline some Ethiopian soul with acid-housed Turkish rock. We’re talking a polymorphous, perverse, deck-wrecking groove overload unlike anything you’ve heard before.

The Assembly, 61 Harrington Street, Cape Town, August 27. Entrance is R60 before 10.30pm, R80 thereafter. Tel 021 461 2519.

■ “There is this sense of constant shape-shifting, this constant ebb and flow between form and formlessness within the music, which makes for exciting listening,” says Ethan Smith. The young saxophonist is explaining the improvisational synergy that has evolved in his quartet over the past year. Given that his collaborators include cooking young improvisers Kyle Shepherd (piano), Brydon Bolton (bass) and Claude Couzens (drums), it’s hardly surprising that Smith’s quartet has found its flow. Expect a dynamic exploration of acoustic jazz compositions influenced by South African, Middle and Far Eastern traditional styles.

UCT College of Music, behind the Baxter Theatre, Rondebosch, Cape Town, August 27, 8pm. Entrance is R50 (presold) or R80 (door). Tel: 082 449 4653.