Bubblegum Club

Tag: music festival

  • Zakifo: A Different Kind of South African Music Festival

    If you’re tired of going to music festivals with 37 different versions of Shortstraw, or if you’re tired of 40 straight hours of trance being called a music festival, you should check out Zakifo, an actual music festival. Now in it’s third year, Zakifo has found it’s feet and it’s voice as a uniquely curated international buffet of music, held in Durban of all places. If you’re not a Durbanite, you probably haven’t been before, but with Damian “Jr Gong” Marley as this year’s headliner, chances are that might change. While the first 2 editions of the festival provided a broad sonic pallet from around the world, they lacked the support they deserved because they lacked that universally known draw card that helps build critical mass. There aren’t many artists as universally known, and loved, as Bob Marley’s youngest son. It’s a monster booking that has generated hype for the young and ambitious festival, but is not all they have on offer. For those of you making your way to Durban from the 26th to the 28th of May, you’re in for a real treat.

    Let me be clear, Zakifo has been a vibe from the start. The first year was a weekend long street party outside the Rivertown Beerhall. It was ambitious in its scope, with 2 stages and a lineup that probably would have drawn better in other cities, but still managed to get most of Durban’s creative community dancing in the streets. We’re talking Mi Casa, Make-Overs, The Soil, Felix Laband, Madala Kunene, Christian Tiger School,  Durban acts like The Wolfpack, Veranda Panda and Raheem Kemet (All as they were making names for themselves on radio), and an international lineup that featured artists from France, Reunion Island, Mozambique and my favourite act of the weekend, the enchanting Flaviah Coelho from Brazil. Sounds like a good time, right? It was, you should have been there.

    Last year, they scaled up yet again, with 3 stages at the old Natal Command. A music festival on land that used to be a military base feels like a small symbolic victory for the arts. They bumped up the international acts and audiences got more than they bargained for from the likes of Ghanaian-American Blitz The Ambassador, Too Many Zooz from New York, Mali’s Songhoy Blues, Estere from New Zealand, and the SA contingent of Moonchild, Maramza, aKing, Tidal Waves BCUC,Gigi Lamayne… it goes on for a while. The booking for Zakifo has been on point and unlike any other festival in South Africa. You may not recognise all of them, but you don’t see too many of the names on Zakifo’s lineup on other SA festival bills, and therein lies its value. You’re not going to see anything else like it.

    Zakifo is an ambitious festival and this looks to be be the year that ambition pays off. While Damien Marley is a superstar booking that has given the festival more visibility, the rest of the lineup is on the level with some of the coolest festivals in the world. Birdy Nam Nam are the 2002 DMC World Team Champs and all around French electro legends, but you probably recognise their name from working with A$AP Rocky and Skrillex on Wild For The Night. Tiggs Da Author’s ‘Run’ will be familiar to FIFA fans, but most notably, the video, which is now on over 2 million views, was shot in South Africa using the talents of local drifters. London’s Nova Twins are bad bitches who play “urban-punk”- bass-laden post-punk that sounds like Guano Apes after listening to Death Grips. The South African contingent this year is also phenomenal, there are the legends in the form of Ray Phiri and Thandiswa Mazwai,  the inspiring Bongeziwe Mabandla (who we’ve interviewed before), the phenomenal Petite Noir, and a cappella group The Soil, who hold the honour of being the first act to perform at Zakifo twice.

    While the South African music festival has mostly become known for giving international indie and alt-rock acts a pay day once they’ve lost relevancy, festivals like Zakifo (and AfroPunk) are booking acts that are current as fuck and that appeal to more than just the privileged white kid demographic. Things have felt a bit stale on the SA festival circuit for a while now- repetitive lineups of 70% white boys backed by an international headliner just doesn’t really cut it anymore. I don’t doubt that Oppikoppi and Rocking The Daisies teaming up this year is because of “The Rand”, but you have to look at their lineups over the last few years and ask: How does this appeal to most South Africans? I can’t imagine things getting any easier for festivals like Oppi and RTD with more and more viable competition popping up. Competition that offers something unique, whilst they’re sharing headliners. With AfroPunk coming out of the gates swinging, and Zakifo building on its solid foundation, South Africans have more choices where to spend their annual festival budget and more opportunities to experience something different, something that actually feels South African.

  • Muse Festival: Crossing the Great Divides of Cape Town’s Fractured Underground

    Cape Town has hope on the horizon. A city well known for its social segregation and physically apparent apartheid-born economic divides has a new underground-ish musical savior being birthed. A brand new festival, put on by Nomadiq Music, Black Major, We House Sundays and Wax On aims to create a space of exchange for the like-minded musically-inclined populace of the city and beyond.

    At this point, most of us are aware of the levels of race-based subcultural segregation in The Colony (Cape Town). We’ve seen the diagrams of the persistently insular race distribution across the peninsula. We’ve read the stories of POCs putting on ‘white’ voices and using ‘white’ names to gain access to anything from basic housing to restaurants and hotels. We’ve been to events where the ethos is good, but the crowds are lilly-white and kept that way by door policy and choice of marketing channels and locations.

    Added to that, we should also all, by now, be aware of the exclusion of queer, otherwise-abled and womxn’s bodies from so many positions of power, influence and entertainment in Cape Town’s social spaces.

    Many promoters who are not hetero, men or white have struggled to make in-roads into the moneyed social spaces in CT, which exist almost exclusively in the city bowl and along the Atlantic Seaboard (with some exceptions). The spaces situated outside of those areas either struggle to gain momentum or suffer the fate of many popular opinions of both audiences and corporate sponsors. We think that anything outside of the City Bowl is too far away (*rolls eyes*) or that things ‘there’ will be under-attended and therefore not worth going to, OR, most sinister of them all, that they will be ‘hectic’ (read: brown).

    Added to that, there are disparate communities of music-lovers – with the same outlook on music and its enjoyment – that exist separately due to inherited subcultural boundaries and who gravitate towards spaces with some comfortable cultural ‘baggage’. The baggage manifests as ‘Cape Flats events are dangerous/just deep house and kwaito’, ‘city bowl events are whites-only’ (kinda true), ‘Obs is for ska, drug-dealing and hippies’.
    Spaces like the now-defunct Cold Turkey, Ikasi Experience, now-closed Bang Bar (with a new spot opening up to replace it in Ottery), LIT collective events in the CBD, The Work Hub in Woodstock, and so many more are easy examples of how those sentiments are just not accurate.

    If you can’t see past the ingrained social and physical segregations, a solution beyond engaging in existing transformative spaces, is to build something outside of it all. Enter Colorbox Studios, their regular events like the Nomadiq Music Block Party, We House Sundays and the vast spectrum of events at the venue that seek to escape the connotations of most of Cape Town’s nightlife and musiclife.

    Situated in a predominantly industrial area in Paarden Eiland – literally seven minutes from the city bowl, and pretty easily accessible from the suburbs to the South, North and East of the city centre – Colorbox manages to build on an ethos of warmth, openness and intentional integration of those same-mindset-but-insulated subcultures that exist across the peninsula. By building landmark events like the Nomadiq Block Party and We House Sundays, for example, that actively bring together a culturally diverse set of promoters to access a collective audience, they both flourish in terms of numbers and importantly also achieve a human-centred safe space of exchange that allows people to connect in ways they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to. And not in a saccharine ‘rainbow nation’ kind of way.

    As a culmination of these efforts to break down sub-culturally insular experiences, they have embarked on an ambitious expansion on this philosophy, by working together with Black Major Selects – the programming arm of the hugely successful management agency – and Wax On – Paul Waxon’s ever-popular vinyl-only monthly club night at Waiting Room. Along with the Dope Goods Market, these 4 promoters have divvied up this coming weekend’s days and nights to program their inaugural ‘All Weekend Music Festival’, called Muse.

    Headlined by Joburg’s Kenzhero, Durban’s DJ Lag (as part of his nationwide EP release tour), CT’s very own Card On Spokes and NYC’s iconic house royalty, Monique Bingham, the weekend promises to be a ‘space of musical exchange’ and an opportunity to flourish, enjoy what/who they know and discover so much that they don’t.

    All info is available on the Facebook event page and tickets are available here

    Listen to the Muse mixtape below:

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