The Horror of The Underground
play any song from the artists on Space Impaxt’s Top 10 power rankings of 2025.
Eternal Slender - Shanti Cullis
shanti wastes no time taking us into the throes of the last hours of a night out. His debut full length Eternal Slender lurks somewhere in the shadows between the peak of the last DJ set of the rave, when you start rallying the friends
the drive home under the Joburg lights - early birds tweeting, the grey-blue morning sky lighting the path home, and the realising that the bag you and your friends got is almost finished - and the haze of the afters.
This record sounds like MDMA, spilt beer and those Rick Owens-meets-steampunk styled outfits the ToyToy kids are wearing these days.
It’s hard to make out what Shanti’s saying most of the time, often being drowned out by dizzying arpeggiating synths, soft four-to-the-floor drum patterns and looming bass lines that hark on late-10s Yaadt edits, early eurohouse
THE FINAL BOSS - Vson
it’s interesting to hear what happens when obviously American references gets filtered through the ears and voices of Braam kids.
vson has truly mastered the use of his voice - switching between the gritty, deep rumble; the squelching high-pitched delivery and a kind of heavily-swung, slippery rhythmic delivery
his choice of beats drift all take the similar palette of
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Dead Symbol’s Ubuhke bub’ hlungu
this album gets straight into the thick of things. what stick out first are the slow, mountainous drum machine workouts - which you realise are bent to the will of Rowan Smith & Fernando Damon - through slight tweaks and gestures on the delay pedals and effects processing units at their hands. layered above them are these discordant, cavernous synths that resemble the valleys on the cover of Autechre’s ‘Amber’.
Only that these valleys are shifting, changing in real time. The time has come for things to change - it seems. Sharp peaks emerge from the ground, charged with the fire of the dreams, images of piling corpse and a sort-of groundlessness that could only come from the vocals - laid-out as manifesto, as witness report to the state - lifting it out from the darkness that engulfs the thoughts of this critical sound collective.
channeling the ghosts of Sylvia Wynter and Artetha, Biko and Baraka, Coltrane, Fanon, Ginsberg. I kept thinking of Authechre’s ‘Amber’ album cover - adorned with mountains tops dressed in ice caps. like warrick sony x lesego rampolokeng filtered thru the blundered beats of early Warp filter.
‘Like wynter wanting to sound like Aretha’
Likky Liks - CHOMI (Remixes)
picking up the few crumbs she left behind after her breakout single, CHOMI, in late 2024 - LikkyLiks follows on a year later with the tried-and-tested remix EP formula, calling on a healthy dose of household and rising figures in the gqom-jersey club-techno continuum fueling Jozi’s queer nightlife since the pandemic.
the more risk-averse dancers have three weighty, gqom treatments to keep their Chomi SZN going, served by some familiar, cream-of-the-crop names in the scene today. With Surreal Sessions, SpacePose & Amaghost Obusted each strutting their best game, they didn’t flinch at the call-up for remix duties - each showcasing the new(ish) strains of the now decade-old sound. slipping either into the moody terrains of Step Down, or the skippy drums and gliding basslines that give uThayela that crazy bounce. At their best, their unique styles are in full-view on these remixes but show only a hint of deviation into something new. A bit of a missed opportunity to fuck around a bit.
the standout edits - which, without a doubt, come from OkayHlengi and SpacePose - seem to be taking that risk more head-on. Along with more conventionally-attractive, high-speed club workouts served by LUCAS3000 and LES.
that aforementioned gqom-jersey club-techno continuum - if there is room for such a thing on today’s dancefloors - seems to be equally propelled and collapsed into exciting new directions.
Hlengi finally collapses the continuum into something else, something more - a thing that gqom has probably been needing.
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