Benguela

Brydon Bolton (electric/double bass), Alex Bozas (guitar), Ross Campbell (drums)

On the South African music scene now for 24 years, the improvising Benguela has slowly, organically, grown a devoted following from their home base of Cape Town. Fans of the band attend gigs knowing that every show will be completely different to the last one they attended. Each Benguela show is an impromptu art exhibition, created and curated in front of your eyes.

The band’s name – taken from the cold ocean current running up the West Coast of Southern Africa – is a clue as to the kind of music they make. The music flows directly into you – it quiets your thoughts, it calms you down. One has the sense that the music has always been playing, churning life from deeper places – and that you’ve just now tuned in, balanced onto a rare frequency, trembling like a stick insect in the wind.

Then, something happens. While watching the band perform, the audience finds itself hypnotised. You are now not simply in a room being entertained by a band, but transported into a world of your own thoughts, your own creation. It is a safe place, a happy place, a place of adventure. The person sitting next to you will be travelling elsewhere, maybe in a creaky old sail ship on a dark ocean. Maybe out on the open, starlit roads of the Karoo, or that lonely corner of the Kalahari in Namibia where farm houses are built between dunes: hear that black-backed jackal now.

These are mind maps Benguela are adept at drawing – and all it takes is a little shove: Brydon Bolton on bass runs his fingers across a string in just such a way as to evoke the sound of a whale off twinkly Kalk Bay, Alex Bozas hunched over his guitar creates the stitch-work which emboldens the tapestry, providing texture, topography, ragged fence-lines, rusty old car wrecks through which prickly pears grow. On drums, Ross Campbell is that glance out of the car window, telephone poles flicking past at regular intervals – and then, lightning, a rumble, rain drops, magic. The music can be ambient or angular, angry or serene. But it is all Benguela.

2020 sees Benguela releasing their 7th album Are You Awake? during the Covid-19 lockdown. Their collaboration with Tony Cox won the SAMA award for Best Instrumental Album 2008. They have also collaborated with cultural anarchist Koos Kombuis and internationally renowned poet Breyten Breytenbach. They have played most of the festivals around South Africa notably: Cape Town North Sea Jazz Festival, Oppikoppi, Splashy Fen, Up The Creek, Rocking the Daisies and the Standard Bank Grahamstown Arts Festival as part of the New Music Indaba.

www.benguela.co.za
https://benguela.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/benguelaband

PRESS QUOTES:
“Tenacious levels of technical proficiency. Intricate cadence. Tough yet tender. Warm and deep. The music unfolds and then folds back on itself. At times I felt like I was...