Omagoqa
With six out the album’s seven tracks done in collaboration with kindred spirits in far-reaching dance music such as Khanyisa, Demi Ma and others, the trio of DJs and beat crafters that make up the group expand upon “The Explosion,” an end-of-the-school year event where young beat connoisseurs, dancers, and sound system masters initially sowed the seeds of gqom. “Bafana iMali”, a collab with Grammy-winning Una Rams and featuring gqom producer Que DJ, sports a spastic jerk of a pulse and call and response vocals that slip through a musical maze. “Qoh Qoh,” featuring Dee Traits, is start/stop funk, contagious and persistent, a track that forever seems as if any moment it could explode; the tension it creates instead builds slowly over its six minutes of dance floor euphoria. What Omagoqa and their various partners in controlled pulse emissions create is a homemade, internet-shaped regional music that has used the tool as a means of connection, a place to drop tracks and spread gqom across Durban before compilations such as 2016’s Gqom Oh! The Sound of Durban vol 1 brought it to the rest of the world. Omagoqa’s music shares that same nerve-tingling suspension with Chicago’s footwork, but without the unsettling jitteriness. Instead, their version of gqom kicks open club doors and invites sweaty surrender.
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Roughly a decade ago, a Durban-based EDM/house-subgenre known as gqom (pronounced “Gome”) emerged. Pioneered by such names as DJ Lag, Distruction Boyz and others, the music takes subtle elements from 1990’s house offshoot kwaito, snags some features from amapiano, gqom’s contemporary dance/pop music counterpart, and cranks the bass, minimalizing everything else, for stutter-y, dank club grooves. And the trio of Andile Mazibuko, Franco Makhathini, and Njabulo Sibiya - aka Omagoqa, have been spitting out single tracks and EPs at a ferocious rate since 2021. Umqhumo Wethu, their latest, is experimental South African dance music at its most radical.
