Amapiano is an electronic music movement first created and still most popular in the townships surrounding the major cities of Gauteng province in South Africa. The most recent mutation in South African house is amapiano. Another dancefloor staple similarly popularised largely via play in local clubs in the Gauteng province, rather than through major label interference, amapiano sits mid-tempo between kwaito and gqom.
Check it out:
1 Zakhele Mhlanga and Kgothatso Tshabalala are the latest to channel the amapiano sound as Native Soul.
2 Aged only 21 and 22 respectively, the pair produced a lot of hits that paved a path for them in the music industry.
3 A cousin of Tshabalala introduced the two in 2016. Native Soul was formed in 2019. Until then, each of them had been producing music in a variety of styles including hip-hop, different types of house as well as amapiano. They decided that with Native Soul, their focus would be on amapiano—an electronic music movement which, by then, had begun to dominate both mainstream and underground music scenes in South Africa.
4 Their debut electronic music album, Teenage Dreams, is not easily dismissed as a project that shows their age, though. Far from it. Teenage Dreams presents a youthful, experimental sound, but the arrangement of each song and how each of the project’s composite parts are put together demonstrate an artistic maturity beyond the two producers’ respective ages.
5 Native Soul’s work has a distinctly dark strain to it, as if acknowledging the claustrophobic urban sprawl in which it is made, while also trying to encourage the listener to imagine more than that, through their instinctual need to dance to its groove. It is a fine balance but Native Soul execute it well, producing a deep album that feels equally at home through headphones or on a soundsystem, one that seems to coax you back onto the shared space of the dancefloor.
