He has been featured by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, BBC Radio 1 and i-D Magazine. The Guardian describes his music as “Joy Division meets Paul Simon in Graceland“. International performance highlights so far include SXSW Festival in 20 and a string of shows with Solange Knowles across the US. Signed to UK independent label Domino Recordings, he calls his sound “noirwave”, incorporating new wave influences with an African aesthetic. Petite Noir is the solo project of 24 year-old Yannick Ilunga, who was born in Belgium and moved to Cape Town when he was three. Besides Cape Town, Yoav has recorded in Copenhagen, London and Ibiza. His biggest markets are Denmark where he has a gold selling number one album a Russian Alternative Music award for Best Newcomer in Canada he has number three on iTunes, and in Switzerland and Belgium all three of his records have been on the charts. Since then he has performed in Russia, Denmark, Canada, Germany, Poland, the UK, Switzerland, Belgium, Israel and the USA. That all started in 2007 when he was handpicked by Tori Amos to be the opener for her American Doll Posse tour. His third album will be released worldwide in January 2015.īorn in Israel and raised in Cape Town, electro-indie singer-songwriter Yoav calls South Africa home even though he only spends two months a year here and the rest of his time performing and recording abroad. His music video for Control, directed by artist Pieter Hugo, won a Cannes Lion award. International career highlights have included performing at SXSW (US), Sonar (Spain), Roskilde Festival (Denmark) and EFG London Jazz Festival (UK). Married to Swedish rapper Anna Rab, Spoek spends half the year in Europe playing clubs and festivals with his band Fantasma.
He has recently been taken on by London-based PR agency Purple, whose clients include Adele, Beyoncé, Calvin Harris, Lana De Rey, and other big names in the business. Through his South African label Soulistic Music, Black Coffee has released music with international labels such as Jelly Bean Music and BBE records. Highlights have been his residency at Ibiza club Circoloco, headlining Amsterdam Dance Event (the world’s biggest club festival), performing in Central Park, and remixing Avicii, Macey Gray and K’Naan tracks. He has spent the past five years taking the house music world by storm, playing in Hong Kong, Dubai, Israel, Spain, Croatia, Portugal, France, Greece Amsterdam and the US. Thirty-eight-year-old Durban-born DJ and producer Black Coffee is the first contemporary South African artist who is genuinely developing a crossover audience. They are currently touring the United States.
Their sold-out tours, strong internet presence and fashion influence still makes them commercially successful: they were the faces of an Alexander Wang clothing collection, and a remix of their song Enter the Ninja is the soundtrack for Dior’s perfume advertisement. At their peak in 2010/2011 they performed at Coachella in front of 40 000 people and signed a record deal with Interscope. Yolandi Visser and Waddy Tudor Jones’s ahead-of-the-curve look and sound brought them cult fame overseas. He has recorded over 40 albums to date with some of the world’s iconic labels such as Mercury, MGM, Casablanca, Blue Thumb, Verve and Polygram. Masekela credits his mentors in New York in the 1960s when he was in exile – Dizzy Gillespie and Louis Armstrong – for encouraging him to develop his distinctly African jazz sound. “Bra Hugh”, as he is known, was nominated for a Grammy award in 2012 and has recently collaborated with artists such as Manu Dibango, Paul Simon, Ziggy Marley and Dave Matthews. In July, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in music by the University of York, he is currently an artist in residence at Howard University in Washington DC and he will open the South African Festival at Carnegie Hall in October before embarking on a major European tour. Here are eleven artists who have made waves overseas this year nevertheless.Īt 75 years old, South Africa’s biggest player on the international music scene, Hugh Masekela spends most of the year on international projects and touring the world. The international market is a tough nut for South African artists to crack: issues of talent aside, travel is debilitatingly expensive and the costs often outweigh the benefits.