Words by David C. Obenour
Words are important. Words create visions, convey feelings, allow us to express and understand. When considered from outside of their commonplace, when we stop taking words for granted, their power is revealed. South African drummer, composer, and bandleader for A Semblance, Asher Gamedze understands this power.
Along with Gamedze, Ru Slayen (percussion), Nobuhle Ashanti (keys & synth), Zwide Ndwandwe (bass), and Keegan Steenkamp (trumpet) share a grounding together as A Semblance. Assembled with a unifying culture and regionality in mind, they are active and involved in each other’s lives. In this way, the words they share carry similar meaning which then finds its power in the music they play.
Off Shelf: You started Of Return with the vocal track “Stranger No Death”, beginning with divergent voices that come to unite around a sort of chanted chorus. Can you talk about why you choose this to open the album and the tone you see it setting?
Asher Gamedze: I think it just felt right. I drafted a bunch of different potential track orders and the main two parameters I had to think about were length of sides for the record version – I wanted it all on a single vinyl – and obviously the flow/movement of the music. This opening felt kind of bold and strong in its own quite gentle and heavy way.
OS: On that track and three others you highlight writings from Steve Biko. In addition to your own poetry, can you talk about his influence and how you feel his effect on this project?
AG: Yeah, for me as for many radicals historically, the experience of being in reading groups and the practice of reading and studying together has been an important part of my own intellectual, social, political and emotional life. Over the last few years, I’ve been part of a reading group that started by reading I Write What I Like – a collection of Biko’s writings. Biko and, more broadly, the movement in which he emerged, the Black Consciousness Movement, have been and continue to be some of the most significant influences on me and how I see myself in the world and what I try to be and do in it. Its influence is present in all of my work in different ways and at different levels of detection. I guess this one it’s just kinda in your face.
OS: You have talked about the album being grounded in local context and collective work for South Africa. Connecting to the here and now, could you expound more on that?
AG: Sure. That wouldn’t have been my precise framing but it has some resonance. I started this project as a way to have a local band that is part of the scene here, that can tour elsewhere but has, as a home base, the context in which we live. For a few years my bandmates from some of my ensembles were geographically dispersed [the Quartet and Another Time Ensemble] or logistically and financially unwieldy to get together [The Black Lungs]. So I found myself playing, with regards to my own projects, infrequently at home or often away from home – mainly in Europe. I wanted to be more grounded at home and have a band that’s involved in an ongoing way in each other’s lives and shares some kind of political orientation and commitment to where we are – locally, nationally and regionally. So, our first gigs were all in Cape Town, our first tours were DIY style in South Africa and then later in Namibia before venturing out further afield.
OS: Is it appropriate to think that you’re reaching into more African styles of music here? I would want to ask about the influence of Afrobeat, but I imagine you would have a more refined and informed reflection without me trying to lead you there.
AG: It’s a layered question which needs some unpacking and debunking…
For sure there are certain sounds, rhythms, approaches to music which both emerge from traditions on the continent and have become associated with a particular imagination of what African music is – which contain a vision of what Africa is. However, this imagination of what African music is tends to be limiting and limited. It tends to be some kind of reduced, diluted and caricatured version of the abounding and radical diversity of actually existing African musics.
At the same time, I’ve studied a lot of music from different parts of the African world, particularly the rhythmic paradigms of those musics and as an African person I approach the entirety of my experience and involvement in the world, music included, as an African person. In that sense, I’m always making music that’s digging into African music and I’m always making African music. That has both banal or basic implications and more complex political and cultural ones which ultimately concern the question of what Africa/African is and who gets to define that. It’s a contested terrain with a complex and violent history.
Speaking at the level of the music and the instrumental approach as a drummer-composer, my own approach to the drum kit on this album is somewhat of an expansion on, and somewhat of a departure from elements of my sound on my previous records. The ride cymbal is much less of a driving force and there are other, often drier, percussive voices that become important textures in the music, shaping the sonic terrain and motive principle in particular ways. A lot of the starting point of these compositions was trying to figure out how to write outwards from a groove concept or a percussive-melodic rather than a harmonic-melodic sense of motion. Some of those developed playing duo with Ru Slayen who plays congas and other percussion on the album.
OS: There’s also some spacey places that you all explore beyond the things I would think to reference. How do you think approaching these experimental spaces from a culturally African perspective shapes and enriches them?
AG: I’m thinking here of something Fred Moten wrote, something like: “I’m committed to the idea that the avant garde is a black thing and that blackness is an avant garde thing.” Where your question seems to set up a separation or outsideness between “experimentalism” and “culturally African”, following Fred somehow, the traditions of experimentalism that I’m interested and rooted in, – across politics, art, music, etc. – emerge from the African world. African cultural forms have been central to the formation of these traditions, so from my perspective, that’s the only way I can approach it and its not necessarily novel to do so.
OS: Can you talk about the band you brought together for A Semblance? Some of your history playing with them and what excites you about them together here as a unit?
AG: Yeah. I know everyone for different lengths of time but all at least seven or so years. I have different relationships with each of them but music is a big part of all of them in idiosyncratic ways. Ru, Nobuhle Keegan and myself are all also part of an anti-imperialist improvising ensemble we have called Free Music Free Palestine – sometimes we joke that we are the youth league of that band, shout out the timers! Beyond that, me and Ru have done politics and life and music and improvising and percussion and reading together for almost fifteen years. Likewise me and Rob first started playing in bands together around 2010 and have been good friends for all that time. Nobuhle I’ve known for about six or so years, we first played on a friend’s album together around 2020 and she played piano on The Black Lungs record and now we are friends and neighbors (that’s where it’s at!). Keegan is one of the cats who plays jazz who used to book me when many others didn’t, and I got to play on his debut album Golden Hour in 2019, someone I always enjoyed talking to and listening to. We rehearse in my bedroom and often everyone stays for a few hours to hang afterwards. It feels like a crew or a group of friends almost more than a band sometimes. The out sides of the music – the catch ups, the check ins, the meals, the jokes, the stories, the travels, etc. – feel like the important thing and the music kind of seeps out of that.
OS: How do you think playing together with them stretched you as a performer? What do you feel you are going to carry forward from this experience?
AG: I feel like I’m still getting around the rhythms I’ve written for the drum kit on this album and getting familiar with the language and way it moves. It has felt like very difficult music for me at times. A lot of the rhythms are quite intricate for me and they also need to be driving enough to move the music forward in a particular way. The ride cymbal was my go-to instrument for the lead voice of my kit for a while in my ensembles. Moving away from that has required a lot of development – of my ear, limbs and concepts. It’s created an interesting sonic space that can be filled with other sounds which open up different worlds. So yeah, I think I’m becoming a better drummer through the process, which is important to me, to always be growing as a musician.
OS: Have you had opportunities to perform this music together live yet? How does it live differently in that setting as compared to the album?
AG: Yeah, definitely. In a different way to many other projects where we recorded the music in studio first and only performed it live later, with A Semblance we rehearsed for a couple of months before our first gig which was in July 2024, and we have been gigging semi-regularly since then. We recorded the album in February and March 2025.
A big part of this band is the vortex of energy we try to create and enter into with the crowd at gigs. When gigs go well it feels like the intensity is very high and can be sustained, albeit dynamically, for the whole show. We like people to dance, to move to express themselves.
OS: I know you’re all very active with a number of pursuits, do you have any vision or plans set moving forward with A Semblance?
AG: Yeah, it would be great to play some more shows on the continent and elsewhere, I’d love to go to South America – any promoters reading this, book us!
OS: While ever present, there are troubling Imperialistic overtures rising globally. How are you managing as an artist and an individual?
AG: The struggle continues. In as much as possible I remain involved with other activists, cultural workers, and organizers thinking about what is going on, and trying to confront anew the perennial question of “what is to be done?” and actually do some of that. Try some experiments, reflect, try again. A lot of the work is slow, building work which can feel insufficient at times of such acute crisis but it’s important to remember that we are in for a long march – we need comrades to walk with and ask the questions for years to come.