Iain Harris music
Early in 1997, rock funk trio Boomslang had axed its vocalist and was shedding its skin for something newer and fresher, looking to reinvent itself in a funkier and more experimental coat.
DJ Bonanza Clone, aka Adam Lieber, and MC Ultra Berzerk, aka Denver, came into the mix, adding spoken word, turntables, freestyle rhyme, beat boxing, and general freak value to the standard line-up of percussion, lead guitar, bass and drums.
They jammed, gigged, experimented, brought in guests and crazy styles and created something entirely collaborative, genre-defying and specifically Cape Town. It was something that phased through moods never static, always dynamic. Moodphase 5ive.
Three recording attempts, constant struggle, radical change in crew and near dissolution later, Moodphase has sculptured and settled itself into the hifidelity hybrid that releases its debut album Steady On independently, on Krushed & Sorted’s African Dope label.
It’s a whole new direction for a South African release, one that crisscrosses the genre playground with diversions in hip hop, lounge, funk and dub, threaded together with bass lines that are chilled out but right up front, and a phat sound that stimulates the ears with richly textured aural landscapes.
A sound that comes from sharp musical heads and devious musical producers superbly produced with a hint of “acid made me do it” attitude. Just enough to make it madcap, not goofball.
It’s a groove-heavy eclecticism that will give the South African CD market the cross-genre inspiration it so desperately needs, and suggest that there is life, funk and future abundant in genre-defying musical hybridity.
But Moodphase’s release is more significant than that. It’s a fundamental part of Cape Town’s escape from the shadow of imitation and out-of-Africa aspiration, to the spotlight of innovation and originality.
The city is no longer scared of talking about itself in music or discarding the genres, it’s not trying to be somewhere or something else.
BVK have been doing it for a while, and POC took flak for years for rapping and dropping hip hop in gam style. And now Cape Town music-makers are bringing their culture into musical context, mixing it up into a global hybrid of sound.
Gramadoelas, collaborating live with Ready D and BVK’s Mr Fat, are taking traditional ghoema and vastrap rhythms and mixing them up with ambient and hip hop sounds. Black Noise is using hip hop as a tool for developing pride in Cape Flats culture and experience and as means of instilling hope.
And Rosanno X and Krushed & Sorted, for example, are working with a number of crews in the Flats, recording their rhymes and freestyle lines in their unique Cape Town way.
Moodphase’s songs straddle Cape Town experience from all sides of the mountain. From the dusty gangster-controlled streets of the Flats, to the cleanly swept ignorant mundanity of Camps Bay suburbia. It’s gam, it’s English, it’s Cape Town.
“I think if something is really genuine and true and you embrace it as your sound, that’s what’s going to live, that’s what has staying power,” says Ernie.
“You know, Brassie is making waves in Europe, people don’t understand the language but it’s so raw, you know. This is how we are, this is it. No make up, no makeover, no pretence. No trying to be like anything other than what you are.”
Look out for Moodphase 5ive’s debut CD Steady On, and catch them at the Bijou, Lower Main Rd, Observatory, this Friday night. R40 gets you in