Serokolo 7 - Maramfa Musik Pro (LP)

Shangaan electro, amapiano & gqom fiends take note: Limpopo’s Serokolo 7 breaks thru with a thrilling introduction to Mapanta; a local, traditional sound he’s revived and modernised, somehow resembling amapiano’s taut log drum rhythms and tense atmospheres, but sped to 180BPM, spliced with toasters and FX bombast glittering with modernist melodic sheen. In other words: 100% zingers! Repped by Björk during her DJ set at this year's Venice Biennale, Serokolo 7's debut is an idiosyncratic, adrenaline-filled reboot of South Africa's lesser-known mapanta sound, stirring its 180BPM rhythms with traces of footwork, gqom and hard techno. South Africa’s scene has perfused every nook of the global club movement for years at this point; whether it's the low 'n slow sound of Durban's gqom, Pretoria's kwaito-rooted Bacardi house or world-dominating log drum-laced amapiano, but head north to the country's border with Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and you'll hear something completely different. In Ga Sekhukhune, a village in the Limpopo province, the Bapedi ethnic group have retained their own unique cultural form, mapanta, a "living communal practice" that has been maintained through weddings and youth gatherings over decades. Although its popularity waned after its peak in the 1980s, producer, DJ and sound-system operator Serokolo 7 has been instrumental in modernising the formula, sharing FL Studio tips and tricks and sound packs in the village to keep the music alive. 'Maramfa Musik Pro' is Serokolo 7's first widely-available set and is a great primer to his contemporary strain of mapanta, and although he augments the traditional rhythms with ideas he's skimmed from other interrelated rhythmic forms, the core elements still remain intact. The unique vocals, for example, are considered invocations, delivered in Sepedi, one of South Africa's 12 official languages. And they can't be cleaved from their ceremonial function, speaking directly to mapanta's importance as a community celebration, calling out to family lines and totems. The rhythms themselves, while similar in some ways to the brittle, high-speed work of Nozinja (who hailed from nearby Giyani), sound as if they've been marinated in their own juices, trance-inducing but simultaneously disrupted by Serokolo's unforgettable oddball production choices, whether it's field recordings, screwed voices or delirious sub-heavy basslines. The album opens with 'Naba Ba Papedi', a bleak uptempo ritual that plays like an unwieldy fusion of gqom (that omnipresent synth drone), footwork (those unmissable rushing snares) and Shangaan Electro, with layered vocal chants and callouts filling in the gaps. Serokolo is a restless producer who's out on his own, something that only becomes fully evident as the set develops with the pneumatic 'Roskae', a fusion of vocal micro-edits and pressurised subs, or the electrifying 'Chunku Manabeng', that excites the core pulse with brain twisting polyrhythms and the occasional log drum smack for good measure. On ’Bonkoko Bagana' Serokolo lightens things up with chiming melodic hooks and a feathery manyalo-style beat. Unsurprisingly, it's this track that Björk made the focal point of her recent Venice appearance - a key cut from yet another truly eye-opening treasure from Nyege.