some of the biggest names on the South African scene, making an irrefutable case for the nation as a hotbed of contemporary musical innovation. As detailed in the 20-page booklet that accompanies the CD, house has become the sound of young South Africa. In fact, nowhere else in the world is electronic dance music so deeply woven into the fabric of everyday life. By way of illustration, the country's biggest names sell hundreds of thousands of CDs in the domestic market - something which all save a handful of similar artists in the West can only dream of - on the back of a thriving and long-established radio and club scene.
House-music culture exploded into the South African consciousness after the end of apartheid, in a wild, new variant of the sound, known as kwaito. The genre's name came from the Afrikaans word kwaai (meaning "angry", or, in street slang, "cool"), and its beginnings were in parties held in Johannesburg's black townships during the early 1990s, where local stars such as DJ Christos would play underground dance records, imported from Chicago and New York, slowed down as far as their turntables could go. (Many attribute kwaito's languid pace to the widespread use of the prescription tranquiliser Mandrax as a recreational intoxicant.) Soon enough, homegrown talent - including artists such as Brenda Fassie, Bongo Maffin and Mandoza - began to emerge, taking the rhythms of far-flung dancefloors and making them their own with boisterously clattering drums and carnivalesque vocal chants. This scene would eventually fracture into a number of regional styles - such as mzansi, meaning South African, homegrown; Pitori from Pretoria; and Zulu - which were closer to global house music's accepted 120-beats-per-minute blueprint, but continue to make dazzling departures from its rigid 4/4 pulse.