The Benguela trio once again take advantage of their lack of commitment by having to improvise due to a total lack of prepared material.

Come witness the spontaneous creation of music through individual action/reaction times and their collective caffeine consumption. 15 years of random sonic emotion has got to count for something...

Benguela have been playing improvised music together for over thirteen years and have just released their 4th album Black Southeaster. Every show they play is a spur of the moment creative cesspool that straddles both the ambient and angular. Their last 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 the country including the North Sea Jazz Festival, Oppikoppi in ‘98 & ‘01, Splashy Fen, Up The Creek and the Standard Bank Grahamstown Arts Festival in ’99 & 05 as part of the New Music Indaba.



The name ‘Benguela’ was taken from the cold current running up the West Coast of Southern Africa and reflects both the flowing nature of the music as well as being geographically representative of where the band came together and the climate in which they live.



“People think of improvised music as Jazz because it has been marketed as Jazz. A lot of performers you can’t classify get put into Jazz, but Jazz has a style, rules and common practices, and Jazz musicians improvise within those boundaries. Improvised music - true improvised music goes beyond that. It has no preordained language. It entirely creates it’s own form and genre. It just creates, which is beautiful. What’s interesting about an improvising band is that everyone in it is changing all the time, listening to new music, seeing new things, experiencing new emotions, developing.. so your perspective on life is changing. And because you’re never playing the same chords or singing the same lyrics, you’re never acting: it’s always a true and immediate expression of who you are.”