A new form of South African dance music is thriving. A pair of twin brothers, known as Major League Djz, want the rest of the world to pay attention.
It was opening night at the Brooklyn Mirage, a seasonal night club in East Williamsburg. In the main area, about five thousand people were bobbing and waving along with an English d.j. named Chris Lake, who played a set full of muscular and rubbery dance tracks, rarely straying for too long from the unifying thump of house music. At around two-thirty in the morning, just as the revellers were starting to sweat, a smaller and stranger dance party was getting going in a dark room off to the side. Banele and Bandile Mbere, twin brothers from South Africa, took to a small stage, plugged in their gear, and cued up a track that resembled an alien variant of the music being played outside. The sound was sparse, tense, and slightly menacing, with a bass line that cut in and out of the mix unpredictably; it could have been house music, except that there was a ghostly absence where the steady, orienting thump was supposed to be. People didn’t seem sure how, exactly, you were supposed to dance to this stuff. Near the stage, a few fans gathered to peer at the Mbere brothers, whose heads moved non-stop, swooping in time with the music, and with each other, as if they were the only people in the room who could hear that missing thump.
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Source: The NewYorker
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