To call it a wave or anything similarly short-lived is to undermine it. Watching the Gqom Wave documentary, a seeming accompaniment to DJ Maphorisa’s Gqom Wave compilation, one can’t help but notice ...

Saturday morning in Durban, 2am, and both of Club 101’s dimly lit dancefloors are juddering to hypnotic electronic music that has been forged in the city’s surrounding townships. Upstairs, the ...

Last month's System Focus column on emerging African and Afrodiasporic networks featured Angel-Ho, an artist bringing ballroom and other U.S. club flavors of black and gay origin into new and ...

While Babes Wodumo’s Wololo may have been the song that kicked down the walls to expose the big sound that is gqom, the sound itself has been thriving underground from as early as 2011 and it was once ...

Click to share on X (Opens in new window) X Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook South Africa (as I covered in a previous profile of House producer Black Coffee) has cemented its ...

Distruction Boyz enjoyed a brief flash in the pan with hits like Omunye, which sparked many social media challenges and burnt its way into the minds of all who heard it as a quintessential ear worm.

Gqom, perhaps no more than other forms of music, is a testosterone-driven genre where the record of female participation can sometimes go missing. For example, Bhejane might take credit for uBaba ka ...

Shiba Melissa Mazaza speaks to South African pioneer DJ Lag about his debut album 'Meeting With The King' and a series of encounters that shaped his path in music and life Aggressive, poetic, artistic ...

Produced by DJ Maphorisa (who also released an accompanying track), Gqom Wave is a 15-minute documentary that sees a panel of producers and deejays discuss the importance of this new movement. While ...

Kwanele Sosibo and Chris Saunders travelled to KwaZulu Natal earlier this year to meet up with some of the pioneers of one of South Africa's most minimal, raw and exhilarating underground dance music ...

From its underground roots in Durban, the sound of gqom music is now spreading across Africa and beyond. But what is gqom? How did it start? How did it spread? And how do you pronounce it? Emily Dust, ...

Gqom, pronounced with a Zulu click at the beginning, roughly translates as the sound of a kick drum being struck. It’s also the name of a sparse, dark, hypnotic genre of electronic music. Made in the ...