Music
Spoek Mathambo and co. present a new take on South African music with the help of an exclusive mix.
It won’t come as a surprise to fans of South Africa’s prolific rapper cum producer cum jack-of-all-trades Spoek Mathambo that his latest project, Fantasma, is a skittish beast. Mathambo has already shifted from twitchy South African club music to alt-hip-hop via filmmaking.
This five-man collective aren’t much interested in limitations, either. Alongside Spoek, they feature DJ Spoko, the man behind the beat for DJ Mujava’s kwaito house smash Township Funk, guitarist André Geldenhuys, drummer Michael Buchanan and multi-instrumentist Bhekisenzo Cele.
They each bring a different experience of South Africa to the table that makes Fantasma’s debut album Free Love – out now on Soundway Records– a riveting adventure. Kwaito, shangaan, traditional music, psych-rock and hip-hop all flash by on a sun-blasted journey across their much-misunderstood land.
With the help of an exclusive mix, let Spoek usher you into the welcoming world of Fantasma.
There’s so much going on in Fantasma – is nothing off-limits? It’s just where we are in culture, there’s no reason for limitations. In the world of film, we’re not stuck in hard-cast ideas of genre. Things bleed into each other. There are moments of comedy alongside tragedy and horror. We’re at a point – everyone, really – where we’ve learned lots of forms and now to tell our own individual stories we can apply numerous forms to articulate specific ideas.
Tell us what Guzu means… South Africa has so many different languages, cultures and traditional music styles and Guzu references them all, these ideas of rhythm, melody, instrumentation, and brings them into modern forms, sometimes electronic, sometimes western. It’s what we’re doing.
Free Love is a pan-global record, but is it still important that people understand its South African context? To pin Fantasma’s sound to South Africa is important for us because people don’t know enough about South Africa. They know about Mandela and crime, but they don’t know enough and we’re proud to share the really dope stuff we have to offer. Culture can’t always be one-way traffic, coming from the west. Saying that, there’s a lot of appropriation of African ideas by the west that’s never credited to Africa – in music, art, fashion. The important thing for us, as young African artists, is to claim what we do and represent it.
Watch the video for Shangrila by Fantasma featuring Moonchild in the player below.
You’re a collective rather than a band, but what’s the difference? There’s a lot of fluidity and interchangeable roles and we can break up into smaller groups and do different stuff. There are many chapters we’ve been working on and the world has only heard a very small percentage. We’re still new and enjoying a new friendship so a lot of it is exploring – jams and ideas we can refine and articulate and share. We’ve got instrumental songs on the album, different rhythms from different cultures, a New York singer called Josiahwise Is The Serpentwithfeet who’s become a part of the crew – our family of artists just grows and grows. In that way, we’re not a conventional band. People bring what they want to bring.
Why is the South African electronic music scene that Fantasma is part of so exciting? There are no gatekeepers. There are so many different energy centres and no one record label that’s an essential portal. Everyone’s got an immense amount of creative energy and from region to region it’s anyone’s game, it’s just who has the hottest stuff. For the documentary I made, Future Sound of Mzansi, I’m doing a mix series where I invite a bunch of electronic artists from South Africa to contribute. There’s one based on a particular scene in Durban called qgom – a tonne of producers making underground electronic music that’s bubbling right now.
Free Love by Fantasma is out now. Buy it here.
Want to discover a world of new music? Like our Facebook page.