Kā’Makaté

Info coming soon.

we don’t play (talk)

Info coming soon.

Asher Gamedze & Reza Khota

Asher Gamedze is a South African drummer, composer, scholar and bandleader based in Cape Town. His music is a profound mixture of various musical traditions from Southern Africa, free improvisation and jazz and radical social and political thought. A self-taught musician, Gamedze gained recognition over the years for his work on the drums with the likes of Angel Bat Dawid, Nduduzo Makhatini, and as a session player for many other South African artists, before releasing his critically acclaimed debut album, ‘Dialectic Soul’ in 2020. Named one of the best jazz albums of the year by various publications including The New York Times, it was followed in 2022 by the duo release ‘Out Side Work’.

Reza Khota is a guitarist/composer who has performed, recorded and toured professionally in South Africa and Internationally for over 25 years. His albums have been reviewed and recognised in the global jazz media. Over the years he has established himself as a guitarist with wide reaching abilities. He has two releases as band leader of his own quartet, several others in collaborative bands and features as a guitarist on many more. The Reza Khota Quartet released their second album – Liminal, in 2019. It features long time collaborators: bassist Shane Cooper, drummer Jonno Sweetman, and Saxophonist Buddy Wells. Khota recently features on albums by Tumi Mogorosi, Gabi Motuba, and on a forthcoming release by the newly formed free-jazz trio Proof of Life with drummer Asher Gamedze and bassist Sean Sanby.

Documenting the experimental music scene (workshop)

Hosted by Cedrik Fermont.

My journey into documenting alternative electronic music, sound art, experimental music, etc. started in the 1990s, without a fixed goal. I was just wondering why it was so hard to find such music outside from Western Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan and why I was one of the only brown kids in the scene (in Belgium back then).

In 1996, I published a compilation tape that presented 25 artists from 25 countries, including musicians from countries such as Lithuania, Slovakia, Hungary, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, Malta and Chile – quite a feat without the internet.

Thirty years later, I have published numerous compilations that include musicians and composers from Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as projects I’m directly involved in. I also published a book about noise music in South East Asia with Dimitri della Faille, several essays about parts of Asia and Africa and toured in 70 countries, and for several years now, I’ve been making video interviews with artists from Latin America, Africa and Asia, as well as doing monthly radio shows dedicated to all three continents and buying (hoarding?) hundreds of CD’s, cassettes and vinyl records.

I think that this documentation is not only important but came too late. It should have started when artists from the so-called Global South started to compose electronic and experimental music, that is to say, around the same time than those from the West. But better late than never.

During this workshop, I will give some more details about my journey and research but also engage in conversations pointing at the importance of networks, documenting and sharing. What can we do together, how can we support each other, how can we build bridges between independent scenes and institutional ones?

glenvst (flat)

Glenvst will be first up in The Flat on Friday eve, with a glimpse into the atmospheric and explorative side of his musical collections. The theme for this performance is combining the contrast between nature and life in the city. All the things we hear subconsciously during our time on this planet, sent through some filters.

iSilo seSandi

iSilo seSandi is an excavator of sonic textures, working mainly with field recordings, archival samples and a range of izitolotolo. His sound is a landscape experience activated through the sonic.

Stockhausen’s Cosmic Pulses

Note: This event takes place at the WITS digital dome on 23 April at 6pm and requires a separate ticket (R40 regular price, R25 for students), available here.

Come experience Stockhausen’s legendary Cosmic Pulses, an electronic composition for octophonic sound, in the immersive spatial sound environment of the WITS digital dome.

You can read more about this revolutionary work at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Pulses.

Felix Laband (flat)

On March 22, 1983, a bomb planted by guerrillas detonated in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Felix heard the blast from the plush, refined interior of his father’s bookish mancave; he was six years old. His father, a history professor, concurred: ‘That was a bomb.’

This was the disjointed reality presented to a kid in Apartheid South Africa: a string of disquieting and violent events experienced close by, but never properly slicing the organised vectors of privileged life.

Felix Laband, over an illustrious career, has abused every neuron and sinew in his body to channel his experiences into enriched uranium for the listener.

As an artist who hoovers up and collages immediate sounds as visions with as much force as Felix Laband, it’s hard to overstate the effect that place has had on his production.

Experience any of his five albums, and you will be catapulted to, and incarcerated in, a theatre of naïve wonder, humour, and ultraviolence all sculpted with the surgical precision of a late-night obsessive.

While South Africa has changed structurally, the dynamics remain, so musical and visual collage remain Felix’s mode of choice for their ability to present wildly varied experiences within single compositions.

It’s a common cause that Felix’s production is sui generis, and the full range of his music can only be experienced with focused attention.

To get a sense of where and what Felix would like to perform currently, combine the production values and their need for heightened attention, Felix’s obsession with archives, history, and politics, and you’ll probably see the artist take the scissors to his own back catalogue and reinterpret it against experimental, ambient, and classical soundscapes in environments which do justice to the effort he puts in.

It’s rare for a musician to whisper about deep trouble with absolute wonder in their voice; Felix Laband can do it, and you should listen closely before it’s too late.

BACKCAPWOODS

BACKCAPWOODS is the electronic music project of Cape Town producer Matthew Ilbury. For over a decade he has been producing and performing his eclectic blend of acid, breaks, bass music and grime, drawing from a wide range of underground electronic influences.

Migratory birds, palm leaves & a trick you already know (workshop)

Andreas O. Hirsch, a musician and visual artist from Cologne, Germany, proposes insights into his research and draws connections between electro-acoustic experimentation, the magic of DIY, field recordings and mindfulness. A 45 minute talk with some interactive elements and a listening session.

Andreas is supported by Kunststiftung NRW.

Sonosphere Flux

Two grand pianos and sound processing. NB: This satellite event requires a separate ticket. Buy tickets here.

This concert transforms a piano performance into a whole new realm of improvised and experimental music. Pianists Jill Richards and Michael Watt – on two grand pianos – play on the keyboard but also use chains, glass balls, ebows and mallets to elicit sounds from the pianos that extend the range of the instrument in extraordinary and beautiful ways. They will be improvising together with sound designers/composers Teo Ringas and Kate de Gruchy. Kate and Matteo will be using live electronics to capture and transform these sounds further, experimenting with time, timbre and spatial placement across multiple speakers. The complex and multi-faceted nature of each sound will be considered, explored and enhanced for the listeners as they journey together with the pianists.

Matteo Ringas is a producer, multi-instrumentalist and audio-visual composer from Johannesburg. He studied computer science and music technology at UCT and now works as an audio engineer and blockchain developer. He releases music under the moniker Tamrias. Matteo’s works have been exhibited in Cape Town, Karlsruhe, Johannesburg, Melbourne and Athens.

Kate de Gruchy is a multi-disciplinary musician living and performing in Joburg. She has a specific interest in the intersection of sound, poetry and spirituality, with a background in classical composition and music technology. Her recent works include performances with her experimental band, an electronic duo and composing dance music out of nature samples she records.

Nandele Maguni

Nandele Maguni (also credited as Nandele) is a Mozambican artist whose work bridges analog electronics, field-recorded soundscapes, ambient structures, and sonic ritual. Based in Maputo, with international residencies in Zurich,Rotterdam and South Africa, his creative language foregrounds texture, improvisation, and a deep-rooted Afro-futurist sensibility. He was featured in DJ Mag’s “Eight Emerging Artists You Need to Hear – August 2024”, praised for his fearless hybrid of industrial, ambient and ritualistic techno rooted in Southern African sonic memory.

Rooted in the sound environment of Maputo – its ambient airwaves, street noise, market cadence, and vinyl memory – Nandele merges hardware synthesis, free improvisation, and field-based sound collecting. His aesthetic gravitates toward lo-fi futurism, merging tape hiss, analog imperfections, ambient rumble, and rhythmic abstraction in live gesture. In performance, he creates sonic rituals: sequences triggered by modular patches, found sounds, and analog devices, bringing improvisation into ambient, club, and ritual spaces. His setups frequently include the Behringer Model D, Arturia BeatStep, analog samplers, vinyl loops, and field recordings captured via phone or mic.

https://www.instagram.com/nandelemaguni_

https://tresorberlin.com/artist/nandele

https://oroko.live/artists/nandele

Boris Baltschun

Boris Baltschun is Berlin-based artist, electronic musician and composer. He works in a variety of media and strategies, mapping the sonic and visual spaces where voice and language, instruments and objects, situations and histories overlap, cross-pollinate, and collide. A central part of his practice is observation – of practices, processes, and things.

He has produced, performed and exhibited widely, both solo and in collaboration with other artists. Notably he worked in a duo with Serge Baghdassarians from 1999 to 2019; together they produced installations, sculptures, live performances, and composed for radio. Amongst many others appearances they performed and exhibited at Sonic Acts (Amsterdam) documenta14 (Kassel/Athens), Donaueschinger Musiktage (Donaueschingen), Singuhr (Berlin), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Diapason (New York City), Beyond Baroque (Los Angeles), Bridge (Osaka), Center for New Music (San Francisco), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm).

He is also a founding member of the group The Pitch, in its current form a quintet with Boris Baltschun (analog synthesizer), Koen Nutters (bass), Morten Joh (vibraphone, bass drum, tape delay), Michael Thieke (clarinet), and Jules Reidy (acoustic and electric guitar). Their latest release is the LP Neutral Star (Miasmah).

Recent solo projects include the Desert Dictionary cycle of works developed in the Northern Cape (and beyond), a project for two automted organs in Just Intonation entitled Bodiless organs (record forthcoming in 2026 on NI VU NI CONNU), and In the public ear, a sonic-visual project researching propaganda in public space in Vietnam.

https://arbitraryborisbaltschun.bandcamp.com/album/desert-dictionary

https://the-pitch.bandcamp.com/album/neutral-star

http://www.ohnetitel.org/

Bettina Malcomess

Bettina Malcomess is a queer writer and an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Malcomess works with analogue sound in a practice that attempts to queer the signal, embedded in an anarchive of collected, found and remediated magnetic and cassette tape, alongside a field recording practice.  An ongoing body of live and recorded work, often in collaborative constellations working with improvised and scored works. They have worked with Andrei Van Wyk, Renzo Filinich, Sergio Cote Barco, Ricardo Arias, Dion Monti, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Gretchen Blegen, and curated and produced the collaborative albums: Proximal Distal: Sonic Passages (joining room/nothing to commit records) and was part of the album Distant Friends (Bogotana Records). Malcomess has performed at PAC, Milan; ICA, Cape Town; The Point of Order, Johannesburg; ausland, Berlin and Matik-Matik, Bogotá.

https://thejoiningroom.online

Becoming Cyborg Made Me Human (film -flat)

Short film (09.01) with introduction and discussion by the filmmakers

Created and produced by Louise Westerhout
Soundscape by Denise Onen
Edited by Roxanne de Freitas

Exploring the limits of what we understand as technology from a scientific, linguistic, and cultural perspective, the film presents medically invasive scans of Louise subtitled by text which foregrounds how language used in various contexts is a socio-culturally programmed technology which serves differing, sometimes violent or oppressive, agendas.

Denise Onen designed the sound with frequencies and vibrations accessible to those with hearing disabilities.

As you experience this work, you are invited to place your hands on your body, and allow your mirror neurons and your imagination to help you access, scan, and reconfigure your own internal view of self.

Reflect on how external narratives – terms, diagnoses, or labels – have shaped how you see yourself.
Ask:

• When were you told things about yourself that weren’t true?
• How have those words or labels affected you?

Louise Westerhout (she/they) is a Cape Town–based queer, disabled performance artist, curator, writer, activist, therapist and educator. Their research engages consciousness, posthumanism, crip–queer aesthetics, Wicca, anti-speciesism, trauma, healing and social justice. They have taught Disability and Gender Justice and Transformative Justice in South Africa, Switzerland and Sweden.

Their critically acclaimed performances have appeared at the National Arts Festival, Infecting the City, ICA Live Art Festival, Artsability Festival and Vrystaat Kunstefees, as well as internationally at BewegGrund Festival and DisDance Festival. In 2024 they were Artist in Residence with the University of Johannesburg Arts & Culture programme.

Denise L.L. Onen is a South African sound artist and composer working across installation, film, theatre and experimental production. The first Black feminine-presenting student to complete a BMus in Music Technology at the University of Cape Town, she is currently pursuing a Master’s degree there focused on graphic scoring and analysis. Her practice approaches sound as a form of audio alchemy, exploring immersive and experimental sonic languages.

Her sound design for short films and documentaries has screened internationally, including at the Sundance Film Festival. Her work has also appeared at the National Arts Festival and Infecting the City, with performances and exhibitions in New York and Berlin. She was shortlisted for the Oram Awards in 2022 and selected as a Media and Arts Fellow with the DAAD in Berlin in 2023.

Acousmatics (workshop)

Hosted by Lolo Ntsewa.

This workshop will cover the idea of Acousmatic sound as well as brief explanation of Psychoacoustics and how the two concepts intersect with one another when one is incorporating them into sound performance.

Duifie

‘Duifie’ is an experimental electro-acoustic music project by Rudi van Rensburg (Wolkberg; Havoc Vultures). The music is improvisational and explores a mixture of noise, dance and soundscapes through synthesizers.

https://duifie.bandcamp.com

kosmothestarkid (flat)

Kamil Adam Hassim is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher whose practice operates at the intersection of art, frontier science, and indigenous knowledge systems. His work investigates how unseen information—whether physical, cultural, or social—is encoded, mediated, and made perceptible through instruments, networks, and cultural paradigms.

krokodil (flat)

Rudolf Vavruch aka krokodil has been DJing since the late 2000s. Known for his rhythmic noise dancefloor sets, his listening sets draw on a broader range of genres such as mandible, folk, breakcore, electroacoustic and harsh noise.

Owelle

Owelle is a Geneva-based electronic music producer and live performer whose work bridges club culture and experimental sound practices. Her productions are built through non-linear processes, blending textured electronics, field recordings, rhythm structures designed for spatialized systems, and processed vocals.

lua jungck

Lua Jungck is an electronic musician, sound artist, producer, and DJ whose work oscillates between club-focused energy and experimental exploration. Her music is a visceral blend of digitally processed field recordings, electronic beats, and tonal debris. For the dance floor, she merges heavy bass, fragmented textures, and abstract synthesis, fusing chaos with raw club energy. Her sound moves fluidly between deconstruction and reconstructing, pushing the boundaries of contemporary electronic music.

https://www.instagram.com/luajungck/

https://on.soundcloud.com/kMrmxghXXTDXdOshjL

SingleMotherOfTwo (flat)

SingleMotherOfTwo (Björn Thomas) is an artist from Cape Town, South Africa. With a focus on eclectic, live electronic performance, they deliver experimental sets that feature deep, textural elements with heavy resampling and noisy hardware-based leftfield production. Blending post-minimal, lo-fi dance with ambient and dub-infused soundscapes. Since debuting in 2024, they’ve been spotlighted by Diesel X NTS Radio and DJ Mag. Leading them to play throughout South Africa at spaces pushing the forefront; & Club, Modular, The Factory and Gorgeous George, for events like TOYTOY, Muud Movement, Vault and Vertigo.

“Their music has developed into increasingly amorphous mediations on rhythm, driven by the intensity of hardcore, but existing somewhere between IDM and ambient.” – Tazmé Pillay, DJ Mag

T A N Z

T A N Z is a new media artist working at the intersection of art and technology. Using code, field recordings, and her own musings, she creates sonic and visual experiments that explore the humanness within digital agency.

Grant Futuris

Information coming soon.

Fernando Damon (flat)

Information coming soon.

MH Bottils & Stanley Sibande

Stanley Sibande is a multimedia creative artist born and raised in Zambia and currently based in Cape Town, South Africa. His art focuses on perspectives on the rich heritage and narratives of various cultural groups and how they can be explored and depicted from a distinctly African perspective.

Bottils is a South African author of speculative fiction who creates electronic music inspired by nature around Cape Town. His work deals with hauntology and the eerie in South African landscapes.

Freespace Ensemble

Freespace Ensemble is a mutable, participatory improvisation outfit which combines music, dance and performance art broadly. This instalment features Hypocrite (voice and movement), Daniel Gray (synth and machines), Andrei van Wyk (guitar and machines) and Niklas Zimmer (drums).

Garth Erasmus and Andreas Oskar Hirsch

Garth Erasmus is an artist and musician based in Cape Town, South Africa. Since 1985 his artistic interests have broadened to include music-making, designing and making his own instruments based on indigenous KhoiSan knowledge. From 1999 to 2012 he was a member of the South African First Nation activist group Khoi Khonnexion. His works in music are predominantly characterized by a restless quest for alternative forms of expression and materials including self build instruments, field recordings or various electronic music devices.

In the past couple of years Garth has also been a pivotal part of various international performance pieces and exhibition projects which brought him regularly to Europe. Most of these activities were developed and performed in collaboration with the Hamburg based band Kante and his band Khoi Khonnexion. In April 2024 he was part of the group exhibtion ‘Oscillations’ at Akademie der Künste, Berlin.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Garth_Erasmus

Andreas Oskar Hirsch works in the fields of visual art, sound, music, radio art and writing. He is particularly interested in strategies of translation and conveyance of meaning, absurd experimental setups and the development of imaging, sound-based and performative processes. Since the end of the 1990s, Hirsch has made various inventions and constructions in the field of instrument-building. Since 2005 musical performances and concerts centered around his so called “Electrified Palm Leaf”, a modified palm leaf equipped with contact microphones. 2014 – 2015 development and construction of the first model of the Carbophone, an electroacoustic instrument pushing the concept of the Kalimba or Mbira.

In 2011 Hirsch started working with Morse code, the “dead language of the digital age”, as futurologist Paul Saffo wrote in his blog in 2006. Together with Patricia Koellges, Hirsch  runs makiphon, a label for experimental music and artist-produced records based in Cologne, Germany. 

“His style could be described as belonging to that small but vital niche of music that sounds as it were the folk music of a lost civilization, a kind otherworldly post-industrial music (…) It is as much science fiction as it is something from the ancient past, and is so vividly evocative that it becomes a soundtrack without an actual film required.” – Josh Landry / musiquemachine.com (UK)

www.hirschonhirsch.com 

Sold Ash

Emerged from the vibrant music scene of Cape Town, South Africa, in 2019, as a solo project by musician, producer, and studio sound engineer Ruan Vos. The band’s sound is a compelling fusion of experimental drone, noise music, dream pop, psych rock, and kraut rock.

Deep Listening: The Story Of Pauline Oliveros (flat)

Note: this film will be screened at the Bioscope. Tickets are R80 and can be purchased online here or at the door, but seats are limited, so advance booking is recommended. The screening will include a live demonstration of drone music techniques inspired by Oliveros and Radigue on modular synthesiser.

Deep Listening: The Story of Pauline Oliveros tells the story of the iconic composer, performer, teacher, philosopher, technological innovator and humanitarian, Pauline Oliveros. She was one of the world’s original electronic musicians, one of the only females amongst notable post-war American composers, a master accordion player, a teacher and mentor to musicians, a gateway to music and sound for non-musicians and a technical innovator who helped develop everything from tools that allow musicians to play together while in different countries to software that enables those with severe disabilities to create beautiful music. On the vanguard of contemporary American music for six decades, her story illuminates the pathway to how we got where we are and where the future will take us in the worlds of music, the philosophy of sound, and the art of listening.

Produced in collaboration with executive producer lone, Oliveros’ partner in life and work, and the Ministry of Maat, Inc., the film combines rare archival footage, live performances, and unreleased music with appearances by Terry Riley, Anna Halprin, lone, Linda Montano, Laurie Anderson, Thurston Moore, Alvin Lucier, Claire Chase, Miya Masaoka, Morton Subotnick, Tony Martin, Ramon Sender and many more ground-breaking artists.

https://thestoryofpaulineoliveros.com

Maxim Starcke with Tom Glenn

Maxim Starcke is a South African composer, multi-instrumentalist, sound artist and music educator born and living in Cape Town, South Africa. While working across diverse genres, Starcke has focused his personal art music through the lens of electro-acoustic, improvisation and explorative soundscape composition. Parts of his body of work has been referred to as ‘landscape music’ (after the title of his Mmus in composition dissertation, 2012). Recent highlights include performing, collaborating and/or recording with Jonas Reinhardt, Shapeshifter/Forgery (with Tom Glenn and Ronan Skillen), Lisa Bauer Quartet, Souls of Ancient Fish (with Dizu Plaatjies and the late Ruben Mowszowski), amongst others. His collaborative album with Jonas Reinhardt entitled ‘Ingenious Ashmen Out Of Hocus’ is out now on all digital platforms.

Tom Glenn is a filmmaker, writer, video artist and musician from Cape Town. He has collaborated and created audio-visual works with diverse musicians and performers including SweatX, the BLK JKS and Hugh Masekela.  He approaches live video creation / performance work as an aspect of his shamanic practice. 

Buli (flat)

Buli is a multidisciplinary artist working across music, visual art, and technology. His sound is an amalgamation of all things that form part of his life; resulting in a singular fusion — pulling from countless inspirations to deliver a sonic experience that feels both otherworldly and deeply personal.
As his practice expands into visual art and creative technology, Buli’s aim is building immersive worlds where sound and image speak as one. His work now is focused on convergence — bringing every aspect of his life into a single, unflinching expression. The technical and the artistic. The personal and the universal. Fused together to form a real and vulnerable representation of who he is.

PURE & Denise Onen

PURE is a transdisciplinary artist, mother, facilitator and activist, whose practice scopes across ecological sonic systems, sound art, field recording, afrofuturism and somatics.

Pure’s work seeks to heal creative wounding by dismantling colonial frameworks that distort Afrocentric art modalities. Drawing from animistic traditions, they explore the relational interplay between more-than-human entities and the natural world. By approaching the landscape as a sentient presence, it resists reductionist views of nature. Field recording becomes a mode of reciprocal listening, cultivating attunement to the rhythms and ecological narratives that shape our experience of place.

Pure brings over a decade of experience leading and shaping the Afropunk movement in South Africa and their discipline reflects a deep commitment to art as a spiritual practice and as a catalyst for conversation, healing, and community-building.

Denise Onen is an audio alchemist and sonic cultural practitioner. Onen collaborates globally, crafting sound for film, theatre, and art installations.

mlondiwethu

mlondiwethu, born and raised in Durban, South Africa, grew up as a curious, shy-loud, tree-talking kid. Mlondiwethu identifies himself as a creative sound and performance-maker, and improviser. The sonic vision he’s preoccupied with is one which aims to cultivate a sensitivity toward the heart, in sound and in practice. Mlondiwethu considers his music to be an offering toward the space of inspiration that thrums within us all.

Nikola Vlok

Nikola Vlok is a musician and producer who imbues art‑pop, dark folk, and ambient noise with a weird shimmer of 60’s nostalgia and hypnotic rhythms. She blurs genres and delicate emotional wildernesses, dipping all her sounds into a hauntingly lush lake of psychedelia.

Brendon Bussy with Crank Collective (flat)

In 2013 Brendon Bussy directed ‘Normal Noise’ at Edge of Wrong. Featuring four young Deaf performers, it explored the hearing world from a Deaf perspective. Since then, as a special needs teacher, he has developed a body percussion system for teaching rhythm to young Deaf students. As an artist and maker, he has created electro-acoustic soundscapes using the noises and objects that people use only once, then throw away. A recovering mandolin and viola player, he lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

brendonbussy.wordpress.com

Aeolian wind harp (workshop)

Hosted by Brendon Bussy and Alaric Hobbs

Get free tickets here.

In 2013 Brendon Bussy directed ‘Normal Noise’ at Edge of Wrong. Featuring four young Deaf performers, it explored the hearing world from a Deaf perspective. Since then, as a special needs teacher, he has developed a body percussion system for teaching rhythm to young Deaf students. As an artist and maker, he has created electro-acoustic soundscapes using the noises and objects that people use only once, then throw away. A recovering mandolin and viola player, he lives in Cape Town, South Africa.

brendonbussy.wordpress.com

Alaric Edan Hobbs is an artist, designer, and educator from Mthatha, South Africa. Drawn to found sound and field recording from a young age, he has developed an expanding audio archive of voices, textures, toys, instruments, and ambient recordings. A graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art, he produced several sound-based and audiovisual works during his studies. Now based in Cape Town, South Africa, Alaric is focused on developing formally structured experimental projects across visual and sonic media.

HEAT DETH

Heat Deth is a personal space to experiment. To make sounds and songs without filters. An excuse to make phat beats and bit crush stuff. I have been playing in bands for over 10 years. Eventually, guitar music became a little boring. I then found a world of synthesizers, music machines and sampling things from the corners of the internet, these explorations became Heat Deth.

botanicas (flat)

ambient sound and installation artist working at the intersection of ecological systems and sonic perception. Their practice explores the hidden acoustic dimensions of forests, oceans, and the living systems that connect them, unearthing the unseen layers of our environment through generative and biofeedback sound synthesis, site-responsive installations, and detailed field recordings.

e%m

Divided by two worlds, e%m is a singular entity expanded into a microcosm. Squeezed out of a lime, a fluid experience and sour at first.

Lynn Daphne Rudolph

Lynn Daphne Rudolph is a Johannesburg-based award-winning violist, multidisciplinary artist, and scholar whose work bridges classical performance, African musical influences, electronics, and activism. Performing internationally at venues such as Carnegie Hall and The Broad, she is known for blending sonic storytelling with deeply personal and cultural narratives. Her solo project Homegrown Immigrant, explores identity and belonging while amplifying underrepresented composers, and her commissioned works — including In the Silent Corners and Dream Walking — expand contemporary South African viola repertoire through themes of gender-based violence, resilience, and healing.

Under her alias Daphne Nobuhle, Rudolph is the founder and bandleader of Sonic Lens, a band and event platform rooted in community, deep listening, and marginalised voices. A cum laude Master’s graduate of Nelson Mandela University, her decolonial research and performance installations — including works presented at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence and the Centre for the Less Good Idea, challenge colonial histories and reimagine music as a site of transformation. Critically acclaimed and recognised with multiple awards from Los Angeles Times, Reuters and named to Mail & Guardian’s Top 200 Young South Africans, Rudolph continues to redefine the role of the violist as both artist and activist on global stages.

@lynn.daphne.rudolph

Mathroom

Mathroom (Fred Clarke) works as a multimedia artist, sonically exploring a medley of mashed genre; low-fi, glitch, sci-fi, breakcore, metal, cinematic and generally left-field electronic composition.

Miles Armstrong

Acoustmatic hauntologist tape loop improv.

Ghia Leigh

Ghia Leigh is a multi disciplinary artist from Cape Town SA, whose creative career has spanned from visual art to performance. Using Ableton and her electronic toys she continuously explores sound, experimenting with various live improvised aspects. For the past while she’s been delving into the world of sound design and along the way became fascinated by the powerful effects of binaural beats and Isochronic tones, ultimately leading her to create a sound journey with a soulful jazzy twist she’s been performing in intimate spaces. Her most recent visual and sound practice has been explorative, investigating the intersection of nature and human existence. Using the electronic music skillset developed she shares her poetic sometimes lyrical story through sound design in a somewhat filmesque approach.

P+A+G+E+S

P+A+G+E+S (pronounced, ‘pages’, FKA ‘Morning Pages’ from 2014 – 2019) is a Cape Town based, atmospheric drone, doom, sludge punk and post-metal trio. They originally had their roots in post-rock & noise and, since 2017, pivoted toward a heavier, drudging tone with the addition of vocals. The members consist of Frank Lunar (bass), helo samo (guitar, vocals and samples) and Caitlin Mkhasibe (drums). Their debut album, No More Can Be Done, released on October 25th 2025, was recorded at Sound and Motion Studios and pressed to vinyl via Permanent Record.

KASA

helo samo is an artist based in Cape Town, South Africa and has been creating solo sound works under the moniker “kasa” since 2003. Creating sound and capturing it is a raw, DIY experience out of necessity due to the lack of resources and no formal training. They consider their work to be eclectic, with a dark, moody sensibility. Drawing influences from, punk, shoegaze, atmospheric drone, noise, folk, doom, drone, metal, hip-hop, glitch and orchestra to name a few, always leaning towards artists with a darker and somber sonic expression.

Gābriel Sieff (flat)

Raised with the fynbos mountains of and around Cape Town, artist-musician and composer Gābriel Sieff is rooted in ritual, storytelling, and other threads of becoming that gesture toward new ways of being, listening, and the spaces between.

Earth & Ether

Earth & Ether is structured around a particular kind of listening, placing spoken word and sound in direct conversation. Page Dina’s spoken word sets the terms – its rhythms, silences, and cadences carrying themes of spirit, nature, and resilience through a framework that is as much ceremony as it is composition. The ensemble, anchored by SAFTA award-winning composer and sound designer Callum Kuhl, works within loose improvisational frameworks, building orchestral, cinematic and acoustic textures in real time around what is being said. The result is less performance than investigation: of what music does to meaning and meaning does to music. What changes each time is who else is in the room. Every iteration of Earth & Ether features a rotating cast of guest artists whose instruments, sensibilities, and instincts reshape the sonic DNA of the work.

venacava with Victoria Lwebangila

venacava is a five-piece experimental band from Cape Town working at the intersection of post-punk, noise, drone, and exploratory music. The music moves between stark minimalism and dense, immersive passages, balancing tension with atmosphere.

The band features Lliezel Ellick (cello, vocals), Cam Lofstrand (synth, drums, vocals), Gareth Dawson (bass, synth, vocals), and guitarists Samantha Rose Butcher and Righard Kapp. Layered guitars, bowed textures, synths, and driving rhythms are a shifting foundation for layered vocals. The songs often evolve slowly, building from sparse motifs into abrasive, rhythmic crescendos.

venacava’s music sits between the rawer and darker currents of post-punk, favouring repetition, texture, and dynamics over conventional structure.

Born in Kiev, raised in Dar es Salaam, and native to nowhere in particular, Victoria Lwebangila is an audiovisual artist, creative director and editor with an MMus in Music Technology. Her work is a cross-media exploration of things that don’t quite make sense, attracted to bubbles of sound that challenge perception. Drawing on her background as a photographer and dancer, she weaves video art and sound into immersive, reality-questioning experiences. She remains an avid explorer of the meandering path, and is slightly allergic to citrus.

nonentia

Non entia is a historical legal term derived from Latin, referring to things that do not exist or are considered nonentities. In legal contexts, it describes something that lacks actual existence or legal standing, often because it was never properly created, has ceased to be, or is fundamentally impossible.

Die Fitz Frekwensie

Die Fitz Frekwensie is a project of sonic exploration by Werner F. Smith. The project came into being as a result of his growing obsession with analogue recording mediums, in particular cassette tapes and the use of cassette machines as instruments in their own right. The project uses tapeloops, field recordings, and FX pedals to create saturated landscapes with a nostalgic disposition. Werner is interested in the various states of consciousness facilitated by such sonic meditation and exploration.

Instagram

www.ditproduksies.co.za

https://youtu.be/aicl76pTtXE

Audiovision (workshop)

Audiovision — Exploring Sound and Image through Michel Chion. Hosted by Renzo Filinich.

This workshop introduces participants to the key concepts of Audiovision, developed by French musique concrète composer Michel Chion in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. Moving beyond the assumption that images dominate cinema, Chion demonstrates how sound actively shapes perception, narrative and affect.

Through carefully selected audiovisual examples, the workshop explores core classifications such as added value, synchresis, acousmatic sound, diegetic and non-diegetic sound, reduced listening and temporalization. Participants will analyze how sound reorganizes vision, structures time, and produces meaning across film, video art and digital media.

Combining theoretical input with close reading of audiovisual material, the workshop offers practical analytical tools for artists, filmmakers and researchers interested in sound-image relations. The workshop is particularly relevant for those working in interdisciplinary practices where technological mediation, perception and aesthetic construction intersect.

Cedrik Fermont

Born in Lubumbashi, Cedrik Fermont is a Berlin-based Belgian-Congolese composer, musician, mastering engineer, author, radio host, concert organiser, independent researcher and label manager (at Syrphe) who operates in the field of noise, electronic, electroacoustic, sound art, and experimental music since 1989.

He works as a solo artists and in numerous collaborative projects – Axiome, Tasjiil Moujahed, Marie Takahashi & Cedrik Fermont, Ira Hadžić & Cedrik Fermont, Dora Bleu and Periklis Tsoukalas & Cedrik Fermont among them – and has collaborated with dozens of artists around the world, including Luong Hue Trinh, Yan Jun, AGF, Gülce Özen Gürkan, Dickson Dee, Zeynep Ayşe Hatipoğlu, Sarmen Almond, Khabat Abas & Hardi Kurda and Klaus Janek. He also composes music for sound installations, theatre and choreographies, including collaborations with Robyn Orlin, Guangdong Modern Dance Company (GMDC), Dao Anh Khanh and Jia-Jen Lin.

Cedrik has won numerous prizes for his work, including the 2024, Kunstpreis Berlin – Jubiläumsstiftung 1848/1948 in Berlin in the music category, the 2017 Golden Nica Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category alongside Dimitri della Faille for the book Not Your World Music (about noise music in South-East Asia) and the 2005 best prize in the music category at Côté Court festival, Paris/Montreuil, France for the soundtrack to Atalodz, an experimental film directed by Gisèle Pape.

Tours and ongoing research have led Cedrik to perform and present talks in 72 countries across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas.

http://syrphe.com/c-drik.html
https://syrphe.bandcamp.com/
@cedriksyrphe/

Deep Listening (workshop)

Attunement and Attenuation: The Sonic Practices of Deep Listening

Deep Listening is a sonic practice developed by the experimental accordionist and composer, Pauline Oliveros – a central figure in the early electronic and experimental music scene in the US and one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley and Anthony Martin.

Oliveros designed what is known as the “Expanded Instrument System,” which is basically an electronic signal processing device for creating lingering resonant tones with the accordion. Over the years, Oliveros became increasingly interested in the effects of these resonating sounds on bodies, minds, the instruments making them and the performance space. But she also realised how much of society is geared towards visual experience rather than, for example, the olfactory or the auditory.

In this workshop, hosted by Chantelle Gray, we practice how to develop a meditative awareness of the listening experience, which for Oliveros meant the art of being able to respond to any given set of environmental and/or improvisational conditions. This aesthetic practice is not only for professional performers, but for anyone wanting to develop better listening skills – whether that is listening to conventional music, experimental music or to the more-than-human musical environment. Join us for this journey into sound. 

Sonic Lens

Lynn Daphne Rudolph is the founder and band leader for Sonic Lens , an event platform and band which focuses on sound and community. The event places marginalised groups at the forefront with the aim of achieving rest and deep listening sessions during events. As an event platform, Sonic Lens has hosted amongst others, Dr. Beverly Palesa Ditsie, a South African lesbian activist, artist and filmmaker as well as the first lesbian to address the United Nations in 1995 while championing  queer rights in pre and post-apartheid South Africa. 

Sonic Lens weaves together worlds of African style and Western classical training to create a self-proclaimed dreamscape. The world of dreamscape encourages the listener to enter a state of meditation and deep listening. The band shifts focus away from showcasing and toward the healing power of music for both performer and listener.

non-synths

the silliness of existence; the futility of creation; non-synths is an absurdist sound artist that uses feedback systems, self made instruments and toys to create the ultimate breakfast sonic meal: rice krispies of sound: glitchy (snap), drony (crackle), noisy (pop). Sugar and milk are not included as it makes the instruments sticky and smell weird.

Chantelle Gray

Chantelle Gray is a professor in philosophy with a long-standing interest in experimental and avant-garde music. Initially trained in piano, she now uses modular synthesizers, a chromaplane and gestural composition to create soundscapes. She is a member of the Sonic Exploration Network of Southern Africa (Sensa) and has written on the elision of women in the history of electronic and experimental music, drone music and Deep Listening. She released her first solo album in 2025.

youtube.com/watch?v=aRCQMRQsUp4

Klumbsy Oxx

Dead Thumb Disco create soundscapes using a mix of mostly diy analog/digital instruments, junk, toys, effects pedals, found objects, etc. Drones, feedback loops , bowed screeches, car engine cassette tape recordings and toy trains are just a few of the spices thrown into a Dead Thumb Disco set to create dissonant soundscapes. Mike (aka Klumbsy Oxx, Mike_Debris, Dead Thumb Disco) is a South African performer/artist who explores visually and sonically with various media and genres.

Lolo (flat)

Chuene Letlhohonolo Tshwanetji Ntsewa or Lolo (b.2000), is a researcher and multidisciplinary artist based in Johannesburg, Gauteng. He holds a Bachelor in Fine Arts and a Masters in Fine Art from the University of the Witwatersrand.

His research deals with global south soundscapes and the psychogeographic implications of post-Apartheid cityscapes through his sound practice which combines field recordings of urban environment with improvised saxophone playing in order to draw out the musical notes hidden in the hustle and bustle of the city.

https://www.youtu.be/@lolodoeswork

@ohitslolo

Bandcamp

naledi chai

Naledi Chai is a Johannesburg‑based anti‑disciplinary artist and DJ blending film, sculpture, sound art, and music production. She co‑founded Fly Machine Projects and Septober Energy, holds a BA in cinematography and sound design, and explores object displacement, reimagined materials, traditional South African methods, and turntabilism. Her work has featured on Boiler Room TV, UK Radio Drama Festival, Radiophrenia, and Club Late Music, and she curated Jo’burg’s Drone Day (2024). She runs the experimental space “brokken//binaryy,” holds a residency at Oroko Radio, and produces electronic music as Pillow Man. She was a selected participant at Reforesters Lab Sound Clinic (New York, 2025) and created work through the Netherlands‑based radio art residency _JA JA JA NEE NEE NEE (2024)_. Her practice incorporates field recordings, synths, archive material, broken records, and old mobile tech, with collaborations across galleries and festivals. She mentors youth, runs workshops, and researches decolonial sound studies, with work featured in Wire, NTS, and academic journals.

https://jajajaneeneenee.com/shows/hi-congo

Lliezel Ellick

ephemeral cello/voice/body

Modular synthesis and chaotic ecologies (talk)

In this talk Aragorn Eloff presents his practice of sonopoietics – a novel approach to composing exploratory music on modular synthesizers. Sonopoietics makes use of bodies and environments as improvisational collaborators, connecting flows of climactic variation, plant biofeedback and other ecological dynamics with human biology and chaotic circuitry to create a space of sonic expression that gestures towards non-dominating forms of creativity in collaboration with the precarious and ever-changing flows of the world.

Georg Dietzler (talk/workshop)

Georg Dietzler is a Cologne-based visual artist, sound art, experimental intermedia music organiser and networker. He initiated for Entanglements the first cooperation among Garth Erasmus and Cologne based Andreas O Hirsch, premiered in Joburg, second appearance in Cape Town.

Currently at <gerngesehen.de> Georg organises nomadic, interdisciplinary series and festivals on sound art, sound studies, intermedia concerts, performance and exhibitions. In 2021 the festival FUNKT sound art radio, since then in succession FUNKT sessions at 674.FM, bi-weekly and once a month in Eupen/Belgium.

In February 2026 he launched another online radio series <timefor : South African exploratory music and sound art> two hours, every two months, always 1^st Wed – a first outcome of his research travels through South Africa since 2023. As visual artist he integrates research and practice to develop future scenarios. Dietzler is recognized for experimental artwork on landscape issues, nature-culture interrelationship, urban development and the use of mushrooms in bioremediation. – He also works as a project consultant, initiates transnational cultural exchange and conferences. Since the 90s he’s engaged in cultural politics.

Georg is supported by Kunststiftung NRW.

https://gerngesehen.de

@gerngesehen_whats_up

Sci-fi Kym

I am Kwanele Yamkela Mkwanazi an independent artist from Johannesburg. I have a love of experimental music and art in general, because I believe it is a symbol of freedom in one’s expression. It leaves a question about one’s mentality and it has always been a way for humankind to make new rules

Ogorogile Nong

Ogorogile Nong is a Visual Artist and Sound Designer, also known artistically as Father Alchemist or simply Alchemist, a symbolic reflection of his self-initiated shamanic path. Through his multidisciplinary practice, he channels and communicates with the unseen world he inhabits.

His musical alias, IONHAVEANAME, embodies a state of identity-lessness, an open vessel for transformation. In sound, he becomes whoever or whatever he needs to be, stepping into alternate personas that exist somewhere beyond time just like water.

Soundcloud

@father_alchemist

Bandcamp

Bettina Malcomess and Patrick Ward

Patrick Ward is an artist based in London, UK. who work within moving image, sound and music in various modes of exhibition, performance and installation. In their music the environment of the sound source, the materiality of recording devices, and the apparatus through which music is shared and heard feature as active sonic figurations. Using iPhone recordings, low-res YouTube rips, warped mixtapes and weak wifi signals Ward embraces the technical limitations of the everyday. Grounded in the sonic explorations of their youth in Sheffield – their approach to musique concrète evades the strictures of its institutional heritage by embracing the socio-technics of bass music and sound system culture.

Ward’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Museum Of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Site Gallery, Sheffield; Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montreal; and Hollybush Gardens, London. Their music has been published by Café Oto as Taku Roku and Otoroku releases.

https://www.patrickward.art

Bettina Malcomess is a queer writer and an artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Malcomess works with analogue sound in a practice that attempts to queer the signal, embedded in an anarchive of collected, found and remediated magnetic and cassette tape, alongside a field recording practice.  An ongoing body of live and recorded work, often in collaborative constellations working with improvised and scored works. They have worked with Andrei Van Wyk, Renzo Filinich, Sergio Cote Barco, Ricardo Arias, Dion Monti, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Gretchen Blegen, and curated and produced the collaborative albums: Proximal Distal: Sonic Passages (joining room/nothing to commit records) and was part of the album Distant Friends (Bogotana Records). Malcomess has performed at PAC, Milan; ICA, Cape Town; The Point of Order, Johannesburg; ausland, Berlin and Matik-Matik, Bogotá.

https://thejoiningroom.online

A Different Kind of Time (film)

Justin Keep is an experimental documentarian currently residing in the Western Cape. His chief interest is in South African music journalism but would love to chat about any form of media in general, from experimental electronic albums to toothpaste packaging design. A lover of old and new, digital and analogue, and everything that makes pictures and sounds inbetween.

For Entanglements, Justin will be sharing A Different Kind of Time, a short documentary he created covering the creation and philosophies of drone music by South African artists. This doc aims to introduce listeners to the sounds and varieties of drone, and then show perspectives on its ability to push the boundaries of what is considered musical, resist structures both musical and social, and encourage experimentation with sound and its definitions within a South African context.

@differentkindoftime_doc

Renzo Filinich

Renzo Filinich is a media artist and researcher based at WITS University, working at the intersections of art, technology, and philosophy. His research explores the relationships between sound, digital media, and human perception, with a particular focus on cosmotechnics and post-anthropocentric thought from a Latin American perspective. He has collaborated on interdisciplinary projects such as Quantum Echoes of Humanity, which engages artificial intelligence and anthropological data to reimagine the Anthropocene from the Global South. Filinich’s publications and artistic works address themes of simulation, machinic agency, and the technological individuation of media. He has exhibited and presented internationally and contributes to research and teaching in media arts, digital aesthetics, and interdisciplinary artistic methodologies.

https://renzofilinich.com/

Xissara

A transdisciplinary artist, practitioner and educator with a foundation in Architecture. Focused on developing participatory frameworks, creative pedagogies, and speculative virtual-real projects that address edges in urban and spatial contexts through sound, dialogue and quantum and material ecologies.

Soundcloud

https://www.youtu.be/@adialidal

Aragorn Eloff

Aragorn Eloff grew up in Johannesburg and started composing electronic music in the mid-1990s. While he initially focused on relatively conventional compositional techniques and genres, his current interests lean more towards generative and algorithmic processes. Most current work is developed and performed primarily on a modular synthesiser, with a focus on incorporating gesture, movement and environmental dynamics so that composing becomes a process that is dynamically negotiated between analogue circuitry, human movement and complex ecologies. Other work, using the programming language SuperCollider, explores the sonification of non-musical datasets like genomic sequences, climate models, real-time environmental data, the stock market and personal activity logs.

Aragorn releases music under his own name and as Asqus. He was one of the organisers of the Edge of Wrong, a collaborative project between South Africa and Norway that provided a platform for experimental musicians across borders through annual festivals and numerous other events from 2006-2018.

Website: www.further.co.za