Mag’oveni - NKATSANYETI (Self Release) [House]
- The Slow Music Movement
- 20 minutes ago
- 2 min read
*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's October 16th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***
This one came to my attention because Andrew Jervis, who I’m following on Bandcamp, bought it and highlights how useful and important the social aspects of the site are, if you want to get out of your echo chamber then start following a few artists, labels, fans and tastemakers, you never quite know what you’ll find.
Details are thin on the ground, but I do know Mag’oveni hails from South Africa, which is where all of this new millennium’s meaningful house mutations - gqom and amapiano have originated from. Oddly enough, after a few random plays of his extensive catalogue built over the last five years, he seems to be more of a boom bap man, but he’s managed to squeeze out this impressive album of raw, sample strewn, beatdown house that although somewhat unpolished, has more fresh ideas than Traxsource’s top 100 house chart put together.
The sounds of THE motherland are there in abundance, overtly in the ritualistic field recordings but soaked in the tracks’ DNAs - tempos are refreshingly low but the urgency is high, samples are looped, loopy and hallucinatory and somehow there’s a comforting familiarity alongside the far outness. I might be doing Studio Mag’oveni a disservice, but there is that early house feeling here in buckets. The pioneers didn’t have much in the way of equipment, but they squeezed every last drop out of what they had, twisting the basic equipment’s sounds into machine music that encapsulated the black experience and which was infused with an innate funkiness and love for the dance, and this album does that too. House is a feeling not an expensive studio.