The timing of Ayobaness! is impeccable. European and stateside interest in South African house has been on the rise since 2007, the year that the UK's Warp Records released DJ Mujava's Township Funk: a glorious single that sounded like 1990s bleep techno melting in the sun. Despite this one song's massive success, until now, a decent primer on this music has been hard to find outside of specialist African mail-order stores and the benevolent postings of MP3 bloggers. Also, there's the small matter of the World Cup to consider. If this tournament has come to embody anything, it is the vitality of South African street culture. The now-infamous vuvuzelas are one undeniable example of this exuberance, but the sounds collected on Ayobaness! paint a far catchier and more tonally varied picture of the country's musical landscape.
Although such sprawling and rapidly developing scenes resist easy pigeon-holing, it is fair to say that South African house is broadly defined by two things: its rhythms and vocals. Here, beats are driven by merciless swing and filled with jerky syncopations that make one think of West Indian soca, pitched down and lent the weight and momentum of peak-period Detroit techno. Meanwhile, vocals tend toward sung-spoken recitations in local dialects and ghetto slang. Beyond these stylistic tropes lies a less tangible but equally powerful characteristic. On tracks such as DJ Clock's Xavatha (Woza Chynaman and Pastor Mbhobho's clownish titular song, Ayobaness (a colloquial term used to express enthusiasm or happiness), the gradually building linearity of US/European techno is replaced with an admirable sense of impatience.
In South Africa, house music twists and turns, full of split-second breakdowns, scattershot drum rolls and bursts of chorus. This is dance music with all the instant gratification of the three-minute pop song; spectacularly visceral and fuelled by celebratory imperatives.