Jungle music is finally gaining the recognition it deserves in South Africa. GREG BOWES looks at some of the places and faces it’s touched
JO’BURG’S hippest live music venue, 206, jumps to the voodoo beats every Tuesday night. The city’s trendiest nightclub, Krypton, has also been doing its bit for new dance culture on Wednesdays. On Thursdays there’s jungle at Xodos in Randburg and last Friday Decadence played host to the major Mutant Beats party.
In Cape Town there are regular events at The Funktion and the Sublime-hosted Zulu Warrior, where local rappers and MCs regularly step up to the microphone. Drum’n’bass music and culture is slowly catching fire in South Africa and its scope is not just limited to white nightlife.
More commonly known as jungle, this speedy and disjointed style of electronic dance music that has more in common with heavy dub than fluffy disco is also igniting the imaginations of the local music illuminati. Kwaito superstar M’Du admits to loving jungle and says he hears a lot of Africa in its complex language.
He and his dance troop Mashamplani have recently been gyrating on stage to the thick, metallic drums of DJ Trace’s The Mutant, one of the highlights of Sony’s locally released Mutant Beats compilation.
Urban Creep frontman Brendan Jury employs the snare-heavy rhythms to propel some of the material he does with the Kalahari Surfers under the guise of Trance Sky. And these are just ripples in what is a tidal wave of local interest and activity.
The often frenetic form has been evolving in England since the early 1990s when techno’s DIY agenda and rave’s hyper-velocity philosophy took root.
British producers seeking to capture the energy and experimentation of those days began sampling breakbeats from old hip-hop or funk records played too fast, giving birth to a style where the drums plough headlong at speeds of over 160bpm (beats per minute) and are tempered by slower, skull- numbing dub-reggae b-lines.
This drums’n’bass framework has since become a crucial juncture for numerous types of music, from jazz and easy-listening through to ragga and house, and even township jazz.
The most notable example of this can be found on B&W’s Music With No Name compilation where Brit breakbeat alchemists Spring Heel Jack remix a piece called Hungry on Arrival by a collective of South African and South American jazz musicians (which includes Airto Moreira and Pops Mohamed) called Outernational Meltdown.
On it a severe and atmospheric drum loop becomes the underbelly for delicious strings and gentle piano dabs from Moses Molelekwa, who also has a junglish track on his forthcoming album.
The same indispensable collection includes the Sangomas (genuine traditional healers) being rinsed out and rearranged by Bristol beatnut Roni Size.
Pops Mohamed is a musician who likes to keep himself firmly in touch with trends and he’s been tuned into jungle for some time now, attracted to its energy and range of expressions. “It’s a new approach to making music with technology,” says the acclaimed multi-instumentalist, “and it’s a moerse challenge”. Hard at work on a drum’n’bass concept album, he says he can’t really cope with the local preference for the slower beats of kwaito and hip-hop any more as he’s getting used to much faster rhythms.
On the quality of local dance, he feels that “the kwaito producers work hard but in the programming room they could take it much further. Maybe in working with some jungle producers they could upgrade their skills and add more salt”. He thinks that we could create new dance styles by fusing local and drum’n’bass.
One of the mainstays of 206’s Jungle Boogie on Tuesday nights is the irrepressibly talented Gaston Goliath, who drums with 206 regulars Emaho and Birdtribes, as well as Urban Creep and Gito Baloi. At home in his primitive studio (tape deck, hi fi, kiddies’ keyboard and sampler), inspired by the sonic experiments and funky drums of avant-garde junglists like Photek, Squarepusher and Luke Vibert, he steals portions of sound from a music collection that embraces everything from Weather Report through to Prince, to construct some utterly superb and uncompromising instrumental music that employs jungle’s sinewy drum element.
It’s a music making process he sees as quite African because of his lack of resources, but which nonetheless occupies his smouldering creativity.
Along with Emaho and Birdtribes Goliath fuses live funk and jazz with this computer age sensibility, jamming along with his sampler and cohorts which include the Creeps’ Sean Ou Tim, ex B-World bassist Rob Nel and Plum’s Kevin Leitcher. Check the Birdtribes cut on issue two of Get the Funk Out for a distillation of the drum’n’bass ethic into a post-Japan, sub-Saharan landscape, and for an example of the form “allowing personalities to come through the machines”, as Goliath describes it.
His flatmate Nel feels that the drum’n’bass pioneers are “pushing song format” and sees parallels with the pinnacles of jazz music, where ingenuity and musically sound compositions come together.
This would seem to be justified in light of the interest it’s sparked among South African music’s leading edge.
“When it hits,”says Pops Mohamed, “a lot of people are gonna do straight-up drum’n’bass that won’t work”. It seems Jungle SA is definitely more than just another imported dance floor phenomenon.
— Mutant Beats is now available in selected music stores across the country. Additional information from Ralph Borland