It all began with the drum. Allow me to get a little poetic on you, for the sake of telling a story…

So without intending to dredge up the ugly past or lay the guilt trip, I’m going to dip into a little bit of our history in order to aid my point. The unlucky victims of the slave trade who ended up toiling in the fields in America played drums of all shapes and sizes in the tradition of both eastern and western Africans. With the songs of lament they sang together, alone, or in call-response patterns, slaves improvised, altered, and embellished, creating sounds rich in tone and texture.

The steady evolution of these African spiritual songs in the America’s spawned such popular genres of music as jazz, rhythm & blues, gospel music and soul and samba. A mixture of these elements, in 1960′s and 70′s New York and Philadelphia, was fused into Disco, a musical genre that would lay the foundations for and later give way to different advents of the development of House music.

South Africa embraced this radical new form of dance music with both arms, quickly becoming one of the biggest consumers of House music in the world. Our love affair with house has not been one sided though. Over the past couple of years, South African producers have begun to export their unique take on house music. We’ve slowly turned the tide into a two way flow of creative expression; remixes and collaborations abound, and not a few of our talented young producers have been signed to established overseas labels; some of those labels going as far as to found their own local imprints, Ocha Mzansi being an example. The global house music community is now peeping toward South Africa to spark the next stage in the evolution of house music. You can agree with me or not.

There’s just something undeniable about the appeal of our unique sound, whether you choose to refer to it as Afro-deep, Afro-tech, Tribal, Ancestral, whatever; there are raw drum and synth elements in the sound that seem to strike at the heart of house music lovers in places as far apart Japan and America, winning the love and support of listeners all across Europe as well.

The passion of our youth for house music, and the amount of work being put in by – for lack of a better term ‘back room’ producers as well as those in professional studios has seen the quality of local productions rise almost exponentially over the last three of four years; it’s now scarcely possible to distinguish between the two solely on technical grounds.

With reference to the old corny term and yeah, I’m going to say it… Local could indeed be lekker?

You have probably noticed that more and more foreign DJs and producers are touring SA to promote their latest releases, Ralf GUM was so impressed with the local scene that he decided to immigrate here. There’s just a massive appreciation for house that isn’t fond anywhere else in the world, and that’s what’s building the momentum of sound we’re crafting and refining on a constant basis.

These are exciting times, as Morpheus quotes in that memorable scene from the Matrix. The future of house music, if comments from legendary producers like Louie Vega are anything to go by, is definitely in South Africa. The beat of the drum, it seems, has started to come full circle. Lelele.

WORDS: Nathan Kabingesi