John Wizards
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John Wizards
John Wizards is a South African band from Cape Town formed in 2010. They are currently signed to Planet Mu Records. The band consists of vocalist and guitarist John Withers, vocalist Emmanuel Nzaramba, drummer and percussionist Raphael Segerman, bassist and keyboardist Alex Montgomery, guitarist Tom Parker and guitarist and keyboardist Geoff Brink. The band released its self-titled first album in September 2012, which includes the singles "Lusaka by Night" and "Muizenberg". The band's style has been described as a mix of R&B, soukous, Afropop, reggae, South African house, Shangaan electro and dub. Formation and signing The band members of John Wizards mostly met either at school or at university. Three of the band members (Segerman, Montgomery and Brink) had previously performed with Withers on other projects. Thomas Parker, a mutual friend, would join the band several months after the others. Withers met Nzaramba outside a coffee shop in 2010 and the two became friends. Th ...
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Cape Town
Cape Town is the legislature, legislative capital city, capital of South Africa. It is the country's oldest city and the seat of the Parliament of South Africa. Cape Town is the country's List of municipalities in South Africa, second-largest city by population, after Johannesburg, and the largest city in the Western Cape. The city is part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality (South Africa), metropolitan municipality. The city is known for Port of Cape Town, its harbour, its natural setting in the Cape Floristic Region, and for landmarks such as Table Mountain and Cape Point. In 2014, Cape Town was named the best place in the world to visit by ''The New York Times'', and was similarly ranked number one by ''The Daily Telegraph'' in both 2016 and 2023. Located on the shore of Table Bay, the City Bowl area of Cape Town, which contains its Cape Town CBD, central business district (CBD), is History of Cape Town, the oldest urban area in the Western Cape, with a signi ...
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Western Cape
The Western Cape ( ; , ) is a provinces of South Africa, province of South Africa, situated on the south-western coast of the country. It is the List of South African provinces by area, fourth largest of the nine provinces with an area of , and List of South African provinces by population, the third most populous, with an estimated 7 million inhabitants in 2020. About two-thirds of these inhabitants live in the metropolitan area of Cape Town, which is also the provincial capital. The Western Cape was created in 1994 from part of the former Cape Province. The two largest cities are Cape Town and George, Western Cape, George. Geography The Western Cape is roughly L-shaped, extending north and east from the Cape of Good Hope, in the southwestern corner of South Africa. It stretches about northwards along the Atlantic coast and about eastwards along the South African south coast (Southern Indian Ocean). It is bordered on the north by the Northern Cape and on the east by ...
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Planet Mu
Planet Mu is an English electronic music record label created and run by Mike Paradinas. The label started out as a subsidiary of Virgin Records then Paradinas set up the label independent of Virgin. After releasing intelligent dance music, the label moved to jungle and breakcore, and then grime and dubstep and later footwork. The label also releases the music of Paradinas under various aliases such as μ-Ziq, Kid Spatula, and Tusken Raiders. It celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2025. Beginning When Mike Paradinas signed as a musician to Virgin Records in the mid-1990s, Paradinas was asked for suggestions for the new dance subsidiary and suggested Planet Mu as a play on Carl Craig's label Planet E. When Virgin lost interest in the project, Paradinas took it over. He quickly drew critical acclaim for releasing a string of important IDM (intelligent dance music) records, from artists such as Jega, Leafcutter John, Luke Vibert and Venetian Snares. The label also release ...
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Kwaito
Kwaito is a music genre that emerged in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa, between the late 1980s and 1990s. It is a sound that features the use of African sounds and samples. Kwaito songs occur at a slower tempo range than other styles of house music and often contain catchy melodic and percussive loop samples, deep bass lines and vocals. They are also very similar tempos to early 1990s NYC house tracks. Etymology The word ''kwaito'' originates from the South African slang "kwaai," which conveys the meaning of "cool" or "bad" in a positive context. The term "kwaai" itself is rooted in Afrikaans, where it initially signified "angry" or "fierce." However, within the framework of South African youth culture, its connotation had shifted to represent something fashionable or noteworthy. Kwaito led a post-Apartheid township subculture into the mainstream despite the fact that the Afrikaans language is associated with the apartheid regime and racial oppression, Afrikaans words are ...
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Contemporary R&B
Contemporary R&B (or simply R&B) is a popular music Music genre, genre, originating from African Americans, African-American musicians in the 1980s that combines rhythm and blues with elements of Pop music, pop, Soul music, soul, funk, Hip-hop, hip hop, and electronic music. The genre features a distinctive Record producer, record production style and a smooth, lush style of vocal arrangement. Electronic music, Electronic influences and the use of hip hop or electronic dance music, dance-inspired beat (music), beats are typical, although the roughness and grit inherent in hip hop may be reduced and smoothed out. Contemporary R&B vocalists often use melisma, and since the mid-1980s, R&B rhythms have been combined with elements of hip hop culture and music, pop culture and pop music. Precursors According to Geoffrey Himes speaking in 1989, the progressive soul movement of the early 1970s "expanded the musical and lyrical boundaries of [R&B] in ways that haven't been equaled since" ...
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Shangaan Electro
Tsonga electro is a dance movement and musical style born from a 21st-century reboot of local folk traditions in South African townships, Tsonga Disco and Kwaito House. The movement has been spearheaded by DJ Khwaya and the producer Nozinja in recent years, who has turned it into an iconic Afro-futurist strain of electronic dance music. Tsonga electro is also called "Shangaan Electro" in the Limpopo province of South Africa and was described as "the footwork-y highlife sound" by Red Bull Media House's, writer Chris Parkin. History Previous to releases by Honest Jon's in the late 2000s, the Shangaan Electro movement has a vast catalogue of cassettes, CD-Rs and DVDs released locally in South Africa via Nozinja Productions. The style has since gained international attention through the release of the compilation ''Shangaan Electro: New Wave Dance Music From South Africa'' via Honest Jon's which showcased the production work of Nozinja and the vocal/dance crews he had establi ...
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Reggae
Reggae () is a music genre that originated in Jamaica during the late 1960s. The term also denotes the modern popular music of Jamaica and its Jamaican diaspora, diaspora. A 1968 single by Toots and the Maytals, "Do the Reggay", was the first popular song to use the word ''reggae'', effectively naming the genre and introducing it to a global audience. Reggae is rooted in traditional Jamaican Kumina, Pukkumina, Revival Zion, Nyabinghi, and burru drumming. Jamaican reggae music evolved out of the earlier genres mento, ska and rocksteady. Reggae usually relates news, social gossip, and political commentary. It is recognizable from the counterpoint between the bass and drum downbeat and the offbeat rhythm section. The immediate origins of reggae were in ska and rocksteady; from the latter, reggae took over the use of the bass as a percussion instrument. Stylistically, reggae incorporates some of the musical elements of rhythm and blues, jazz, mento (a celebratory, rural folk form ...
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African Popular Music
African popular music (also styled Afropop, Afro-pop, Afro pop or African pop) can be defined as any African music, regardless of genre, that uses Western pop musical instruments, such as the guitar, piano, trumpet, etc.Olabode, O. (2023, January 24)''Afropop shaping the future of global music'' FAB L’Style. Afropop is a genre of music that combines elements from both African traditional music with Western pop music, characterized by the use of African rhythms and melodies, as well as western instrumentation and production techniques. Like African traditional music, Afropop is vast and varied. Most contemporary genres of western popular music build on cross-pollination with traditional African American and African popular music. Many genres in popular music of rock, metal, pop, blues, jazz, salsa, zouk, and rumba derive, of varying degrees, musical traditions from Africa cultured to the Americas, by enslaved Africans. These rhythms and sounds have subsequently been a ...
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Soukous
Soukous (from French '' secousse'', "shock, jolt, jerk") is a genre of dance music originating from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire) and the Republic of the Congo (formerly French Congo). It derived from Congolese rumba in the 1960s, with faster dance rhythms and bright, intricate guitar improvisation, and gained popularity in the 1980s in France. Although often used by journalists as a synonym for Congolese rumba, both the music and dance associated with soukous differ from more traditional rumba, especially in its higher tempo, song structures and longer dance sequences. Soukous fuses traditional Congolese rhythms with contemporary instruments. It customarily incorporates electric guitars, double bass, congas, clips, and brass/ woodwinds. Soukous lyrics often explore themes of love, social commentary, amorous narratives, philosophical musings, and ordinary struggles and successes. Singers occasionally sing and croon in Lingala, Kikongo, French and S ...
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Dub Music
Dub is a musical style that grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is commonly considered a subgenre of reggae, though it has developed to extend beyond that style.Dub: soundscapes and shattered songs in Jamaican reggae, p. 2. Generally, dub consists of remixes of existing recordings created by significantly manipulating the original, usually through the removal of vocal parts, emphasis of the rhythm section (the stripped-down drum-and-bass track is sometimes referred to as a riddim), the application of studio effects such as Delay (audio effect), echo and reverb effect, reverb, and the occasional dubbing (music), dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version or other works.Michael Veal (2013)''Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae'', pages 26–44, "Electronic Music in Jamaica" Wesleyan University Press. Dub was pioneered by Audio engineer, recording engineers and producers such as King Tubby, Osbourne "King Tubby" ...
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University Of Cape Town
The University of Cape Town (UCT) (, ) is a public university, public research university in Cape Town, South Africa. Established in 1829 as the South African College, it was granted full university status in 1918, making it the oldest university in South Africa and the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, oldest university in Sub-Saharan Africa in continuous operation. UCT is organised in 57 departments across six faculties offering Bachelor's degree, bachelor's (Education in South Africa#Higher education and training system, NQF 7) to Doctorate, doctoral degrees (Education in South Africa#Higher education and training system, NQF 10) solely in the English language. Home to 30,000 students, it encompasses six campuses in the Capetonian suburbs of Rondebosch, Hiddingh, Observatory, Cape Town, Observatory, Mowbray, Cape Town, Mowbray, and the Waterfront. It is the only African member of the Global University Leaders Forum (GULF) within the World Economic Forum, ...
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Mike Paradinas
Michael Robert Paradinas (born 26 September 1971), better known by his stage name μ-Ziq (pronounced "music" or mu-zik), is an English electronic musician from Wimbledon, London. He was associated with the electronic style intelligent dance music (IDM) during the 1990s, and recorded on Rephlex Records and Reflective Records. His critically acclaimed 1997 album, ''Lunatic Harness'', helped define the drill 'n' bass subgenre and was also his most successful release, selling over 100,000 copies. Paradinas founded the record label Planet Mu, begun in 1995, where he has championed genres such as juke, IDM and footwork. History Paradinas was born in Charing Cross and began playing keyboards during the early 1980s, and listened to new wave music such as OMD, Heaven 17 and early Human League. He joined a few bands in the mid-1980s, then spent eight years on keyboards for the group Blue Innocence. During this period, Paradinas had been recording on his own as well with synthe ...
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