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Gqom Oh! x Crudo Volta Mixtape

  • Gqom Oh!

This collaborative mixtape between Gqom Oh! and the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective showcases some of the best music that gqom—a raw, brash dance music coming from Durban—has ever produced.

A brash and intriguing sound emerged from a Soundcloud hashtag 18 months ago. It was called gqom (pronounced “gomme”), and the raw, underground-beloved and house-adjacent genre has spread from Southeast South Africa’s shores to the world, partly due to the efforts of the Gqom Oh! label. This collaborative project, following up on that label’s breakthrough mixtape The Sound of Durban, Vol. 1, matches Gqom Oh! with the Rome-based Crudo Volta collective, whose name translates from Italian-to-English as “raw time.” Together the two have assembled this mixtape, which serves as the soundtrack of the *Woza Taxi *documentary, in which Gqom Oh! boss Nan Kolè visited his artists and their families in Durban, providing both depth and context for both the sounds and the genre itself.

Watching the doc as well as listening to its soundtrack alone, we get the sense of pride in Zulu culture in the face of bleak realities and a taste of the free-styling hlanganisa, a Zulu word meaning “putting together.” Kolè’s ability to curate music that both celebrates and honestly assesses Durban’s raw and harsh societal realities makes these 14 tracks potentially the best collection from the genre-to-date. Producers like Dominowe and Mafia Boyz are here, and it’s their respective works like “Africa’s Cry” and “6 to 6” upon which the genre’s breakout was predicated.

However, in “Bhengi yoKhalipha,” a Mafia Boyz contribution whose name translates from Zulu-to-English as “dance retarded,” there’s a definite feeling that you’re getting something more from gqom than ever before. Chopping vocal snatches and heavy grooves breaking against ambient depths make the track sound like it’s Jersey club being played in one of Dante’s circles of hell. As for Dominowe, his tracks “Darbuka Tribe” and “Dark Valley” are respectively songs that push the classic Baltimore elements of 2015’s “Africa’s Cry” into more of an angry wail via harrowing synths and breaks that clang against the deep nothingness of the missing bassline below.

There’s also some work here that hearkens to Baltimore-based producer Rod Lee’s famous single “Dance My Pain Away.” Citizen Boy’s track “Indaba ka bani besibenuza” means “who cares if we dance under the influence of drugs,” hinting the pain expressed in gqom that isn’t “danced away,” but more so reveled in to the point of seeming madness. “Indaba ka bani besibenuza” warms up with crunching staccato drums like another classic Baltimore cut, Debonair Samir’s “Samir’s Theme,” but instead of falling into a manic series of horn stabs, this track meets up with demonic bell tolls and snatches of tribal chants that fall much more in line with the scariest stereotypes of warehouse raves.

There’s tons of excellent underground club fodder on the mixtape, like “Hennesey,” a track in which Emo Kid and WorstHood combine forces and brilliantly answers the hypothetical “What if you put Crime Mob’s 2004 rap hit ‘Knuck If You Buck,’ tech house, and Afro-beat in a blender?” However, it's Julz Da Deejay’s “Quantums and Qo” that hits harder than “just another club anthem.” The white noise, simmering synths and overwhelming series of vocal samples add up to something like the gqom equivalent of MARRS’ 1987 pop-crossover house single “Pump Up the Volume.”

The mixtape and related film exist in order to recontextualize gqom from a genre of music made by scads of producers on Soundcloud into the Zulu face of Durban, South Africa’s urban underbelly. From a city where murders happen at a rate that rivals that of Detroit’s, the idea that 20-plus Zulu youths would be inclined to create music that both revels in said violence while also discovering a progressive sonic space is inspiring. Here, a culture foreign to most is portrayed in it’s most nuanced and honest light, and impressively shines through its own darkness.

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