“Echoes,” the latest track from the Cape Town pop trio Beatenberg plays like the soundtrack to a teenage soul-searching montage in a classic 90s flick – and we like it a lot. Matthew Field, lead singer, guitarist and songwriter says of Echoes: “The chorus is about wanting immortality, and about writing songs, and about putting one’s self into another person, or imagining doing so.” The sound of waves and birds at the beach were recorded in Plettenberg Bay, a popular holiday spot on the south-eastern coast of South Africa. 90s soundtrack music may be the newest movement out of Cape Town, just listen to Popskarr‘s synth-heavy “Fighter” (another OKA fav). Listen to other Beatenberg tunes and purchase their latest album Farm Photos here.
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Audio: The Brother Moves On
“This is where he died” says Siyabonga Mthembu, lead vocalist of the South African funk-rock collective The Brother Moves On. The performance-art group made a quick stopover in Cape Town to promote their debut EP The Golden Wake. And on this particular night, their first outing, it’s a decidedly sombre affair. “He didn’t mean to die,” Mthembu says, “nobody means to die. You just do”.
The departed is Mr Gold waseGoli; an Everyman from the hinterland of South Africa who travels to Johannesburg in search of ‘gold’. The Brother’s six-track concept EP is an elegy for the deceased; speaking to both his ancestors and descendants.
Likewise, the genre-bending sound of the collective is as much about looking to the past – with nods to Busi Mhlongo, Phuzekhemisi, and Philip Tabane – as it is about making new discoveries. “We have a difficulty describing what our music is,” Siyabonga says before rattling of a list of experimental urban black bands emerging on the Jo’burg music scene: The Fridge, Meat the Veggies, Planet Lindela, Future History and others. “It’s South African” guitarist Zelizwe Mthembu says, summing up the debate.
Whichever coat fits, underlying the artistic enterprise of The Brother Moves On is, as Siyabonga says, a search “for an alternate relationship to being South African, to being black, to being from this space and time”.
The evening ends with a performance of the EP’s last song “Wenu Wetla” Stretching well over ten minutes, the song is a prayer; “it’s saying I’m lost in a sea of languages and I don’t understand shit anymore. And how many of us really feel like that?”
You can download the Golden Wake EP for free here.