Mark Ernestus Loves Amapiano

His new RA mix shows a deep appreciation for the vital African electronic music movement

Mark Ernestus – one of the two masterminds behind the Basic Channel, Maurizio and Rhythm & Sound projects – is known as an elusive figure.

Throughout his 35-year long career, Berlin’s original dub techno don has rarely done interviews. Just a few photos of him are circulating online. He’s not on social media and generally stays away from the spotlight as far as he can.

But he seems weirdly ubiquitous this summer.

Back in May, after an almost decade-long gap, his Ndagga Rhythm Force group released the stunning album Khadim. Here’s what I had to say in my mid-year album round-up where it landed on #3:

Mark Ernestus’ long-running Ndagga project is where analogue studio wizardry meets Senegalese polyrhythms and mystical Sufi chants. Ten years after the first album comes this minimal four-track stunner centered around this 13-and-a-half minute masterpiece. All four riddims recall the classic Rhythm & Sound aesthetic, rooted in soundsystem culture but infused with an Afrofuturist vision of traditional West African music.

Last week, I was lucky enough to see Ndagga Rhythm Force perform live at London’s Café Oto on a hot Monday night – a truly magical, spiritual experience. Ernestus, as usual, wasn’t even on stage with the band, engineering the sound from the front of house; but the group invited several audience members to dance with them on stage.

Just a few days later, I got alerted to a mix that Ernestus had contributed to Resident Advisor’s long-running podcast series. I was definitely intrigued, as his underground roots and fame go deep enough that he doesn’t actively have to feed the content mill – so when he puts something out, it has to truly mean something to him.

To my positive surprise, he provided a full two-hour mix for the podcast’s RA.1000 anniversary episode, along with an actual cover photo and a very brief interview. (Though he was clearly taking the piss, answering only one of the four questions properly, and being as blunt as humanly possible.)

The best part was that the mix is not some self-referential look back on his own legacy in dub techno or ambient electronica, but that it contains a selection of his favorite contemporary amapiano tunes.

Now I am by no means an expert on amapiano, but it continues to excite me as one of the most vital movements in contemporary electronic music.

I love its distinctive aesthetic language and sound palette, defined by strong log drum basslines, dramatic – sometimes outright gothic – synthesizer and piano work, and syncopated programmed beats at a relatively slow pace of 110–115 bpm. As someone who really enjoyed 1990s ambient techno and jazzy deep house, this music feels weirdly familiar, though completely foreign and fresh at the same time.

Born in South Africa’s townships, amapiano might have evolved from kwaito, an older South African variant of deep house, but it has long surpassed its predecessor’s reach and popularity.

I got alerted to the music in 2020, when I was working on global playlist strategies for the biggest streaming service in the world. Certain data indicated a serious cultural movement from Sub-Saharan Africa on the rise. The trend had apparently been bubbling underneath the radar since the early 2010s, but saw a huge uptick in popularity through social media and streaming in the year of 2019.

I remember spending countless hours during the pandemic browsing tunes and playlists from South Africa, watching short reels and dance tutorials, impressed by the bold inventiveness of this new genre. Soon I even had a bunch of favorite producers, but I knew nothing about them except their colourful names – Mr JazziQ, Kabza De Small, Tyler ICU, DJ Maphorisa, Uncle Waffles or Nandipha808.

In the following years, the trend first reached West Africa, where popular artists like Asake and Davido blended amapiano with afrobeats. The music and culture soon became wildly popular all over the continent; African diaspora communities were instrumental in spreading the sound globally. Clubs and festivals around the world started booking amapiano DJs. Suddenly, influential pop stars like Beyoncé were overheard talking about their apparent love for the genre.

An interesting case study in the rise of amapiano from local underground to global mainstream phenomenon is German pop star Peter Fox’s hit song “Zukunft Pink” (“Pink Future”). Fox, who’s an extremely successful producer and singer-songwriter with roots in reggae/dancehall culture, came back with this massive #1 tune based on an amapiano beat in October 2022 after a decade-plus break from releasing music as a solo artist.

Along with the massive success came accusations of cultural appropriation, mainly because he didn’t openly address the obvious influence of certain amapiano tunes on his production in the communication around the single.

Personally, I do believe he had only the most positive and pure intentions about sharing his love for the sound, but he should possibly have been more forthcoming in shouting out its South African originators. At the time, not many mainstream listeners in Germany would have been aware of the movement at all, so he definitely missed an opportunity to educate them at first.

Though clearly a very commercial-sounding production, “Zukunft Pink” is still a banger and probably my favorite German pop song of the past few years.

Peter Fox and Mark Ernestus are not exactly of the same generation – Mark was born in 1963, Peter in 1971 – but they are both mature icons of Berlin’s music scene with a deep connection to Jamaican soundsystem culture and a long history of promoting reggae music and its derivates in Europe, studying its techniques and incorporating elements in their own music to quite different results.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Peter Fox created a hugely successful German version of dancehall and roots reggae with his band Seeed, reflecting the multicultural, multilingual landscape in his hometown of Berlin. He went on to release his opus magnum Stadtaffe (City Ape) in 2008, one of the best-selling German albums of all time. Over dancehall rhythms with orchestral instrumentation, he toasted highly relatable lyrics – informed by hip-hop and performed with a melodic pop sensibility.

Ernestus, on the other hand, built his reputation in the early to late 1990s with groundbreaking explorations of instrumental electronic music in new areas such as ambient and minimal techno (Basic Channel), dub techno (which he arguably invented in ‘92 under the Maurizio moniker), and dub-infused electronica (Rhythm & Sound). In all of these projects, he worked with his long-term musical partner Moritz von Oswald. Ernestus also co-founded the influential Chain Reaction label, and founded Hard Wax, one of the first techno record stores in Europe, in 1989.

In keeping with the spirit of Jamaica’s original dub wizards, Mark has always been exploring the experimental edges of electronic music aside from his dancefloor adventures. On the fringes of his oeuvre, you will find fascinating tracks like “Radiance III”, “Mutism”, “Roll Off / B” or “Imprint” – longform pieces that feel closer to dub versions of musique concrète compositions than to actual techno, often lacking the 4/4 bassdrum pulse and constructed of not much more than hiss and static, rumbling bass and delay.

In the past decade, he’s been closely associated with Senegalese group Ndagga Rhythm Force and their contemporary take on mbalax, a popular West African music style based on the traditional sabar drum, infused with Ernestus’ elaborate electronics and dub effects. While he’s never broken through into the cultural mainstream – the average person in Germany wouldn’t know his face or name –, Mark’s global underground fame seems boundless.

Released just a few days ago, his RA.1000 mix compiles 22 of his personal amapiano favorites from the past five years over two hours, from Caltonic SA’s 2020 classic “Bambelela” to HFLY & Mbuso De Mbazo’s recent anthem “Masingitah”.

Needless to say, the mix is technically flawless. I love that he doesn’t transition between tunes quickly but gives every track its time to unfold, sometimes even plays a large portion of the outro, a segment that regularly showcases the minimal percussive backdrop of a track. These can actually feel every bit as sparse and deep (and sometimes, outright weird) as some of the best Rhythm & Sound or Chain Reaction records.

His amapiano mix is more of an actual dancefloor affair, coming at exactly the right time – when temperatures in Europe are finally soaring after a relatively cold and rainy July, and festival season is in full swing.

As I’d expect from Mark, he doesn’t lean towards the biggest hits in his selection. His focus lies on interesting tunes from a production value standpoint, with a nicely balanced amount of vocal tracks and instrumental versions in the mix.

Following his journey over the last 30 years from techno, dub and electronica into West-African music, I think it just makes so much sense that he’s deep into amapiano as well, and it doesn’t surprise me at all that he proves extremely good taste as a curator.

While Peter Fox created a commercialized version of amapiano tailored for the German mass market, Ernestus is eager to shine a light on the innovations in South Africa’s musical underground – “such a great generation of producers”, he’s quoted in that brief RA interview. (I’d love to hear a mix of Peter Fox’s favorite amapiano tunes too, anticipating his selection might lean more towards the club smashes.)

Over the two hours, Mark takes us on a journey through the history of amapiano since its local breakthrough, highlighting some of its most inventive producers and outstanding tracks from 2020–2025.

Even if you’ve never gotten into amapiano or understood what all the hype and fuss is about – this is the perfect moment to dive in. The hypetrain is long gone, but the music has proven its longevity and continued resistance to becoming stale and formulaic. This is clearly not a short-lived trend, but an ongoing movement that deserves our ongoing attention.

I don’t even listen to many mixes these days, but Mark’s RA.1000 has been on constant repeat for the last three days. I wouldn’t send this out as a standalone recommendation if I didn’t believe this is truly one for the history books.

Listen and download on Soundcloud.