Ten years ago, if you’d asked the average electronic music fan where the next wave of innovation in electronic music was likely to originate, they might have suggested London, pointing to the myriad variations of future-facing, bass-heavy music that emerged from dubstep’s smoky haze in the late ’00s. These days, though, you’re far more likely to hear new sounds coming out of the clubs of South Africa than a sweaty basement in Shoreditch.
Over the past decade, styles like amapiano, shangaan and afrohouse have spilled out of South Africa’s townships and on to the global stage, as Durban and Cape Town have supplanted Berlin and London as the hotspots for invention and creativity in the electronic music world.
Perhaps the most influential style to come out of South Africa has been gqom, a hard-hitting, minimal take on house music that substitutes that genre’s predictable 4/4 pulse for a
