- House music past, present and future from a key Johannesburg producer.
- In the opening dialogue of RA's Real Scenes: Johannesburg film, the DJ and producer Mbuso Tulwana jokes that if you ask any South African kid where they think house music comes from, they would say, "It comes from here." Although gqom and amapiano have taken the world by storm in the past couple of years, house music remains ubiquitous across the country. Unlike Mbuso's proverbial kids, the Johannesburg producer KaySoul is very much attuned to the Black and American history of house. He channeled Larry Heard and Kerri Chandler to explore the most soulful reaches of the spectrum on his last two EPs. Now with What Is Blackness?, his debut for Bristol label Shall Not Fade, he journeys further into the deep and expands his geographical references to evoke not only the past but also the future of house music.
In conjuring up the ghosts of the past, KaySoul pays homage while tweaking the usual deep house tropes. Vintage pads create a luxurious and rich atmosphere across the record, but the rhythms and synthlines are skittish and playful. There's a cartoonish 8-bit synth that snakes through the otherwise mellow "That Blackness" that keeps the track active rather than hypnotic. The soft and sultry guitar on "East Meets South," a collaboration with fellow South African Kurtx, suggests stoned lethargy, but the competing hand drums and sharp chord progression spice up the track's mellow atmosphere.
To KaySoul, the political possibilities of house are as important as the music itself. While the Nina Simone interview in "That Blackness" might be the only explicit political reference, but the rest of the EP feels implicitly political as he traces connections through the Black diaspora across the globe. Whether it's the maracas and forlorn sax solo mapping a line from Rio to Johannesburg in "Africanus," or the Midwest fresh "10 Ways," which features a Rhodes line that would have Theo Parrish reaching for Shazam, the record is filled with references to Black dance music at all latitudes and longitudes. The title of the EP poses a question, "What Is Blackness?" A question of that scale may be outside the scope of any one EP to answer, but I'd venture so far to say that KaySoul does remind us what house music is. With his globetrotting itinerary and careful deployment of classic house motifs, What Is Blackness underlines that, no matter where it's coming from, house music has always been and always will be Black music.
Tracklist01. That Blackness
02. Africanus feat. Gustavo Martinez
03. 10 Ways feat. Steve Faets
04. East Meets South feat. Kurtx
05. Yak