bios

Reactionary Reviews | Valley Girl | Amy Tjasink


Valley Girl is a bright breezy self-identified contemporary folk album that is charming until you listen to it.

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an interview with Kaden Arguile

Kaden Arguile, the GOOD candidate for Ward 77 in Cape Town, turns 28 on the day of the municipal elections. The “GOOD party” sounds like the name of a 90s rave but it's really not.

With the party challenging Helen Zille's legal right to run for mayor of Johannesburg, and Arguile running as a candidate in the city bowl, on an anti predatory property development ticket, in municipal elections that have the highest youth voter registration rate in recent history, along with a sharp increase in the number of candidates under 30, some under 20, it seemed like a good (sorry) idea to unpack exactly how one of the older young candidates sees the political landscape.

This interview conducted on 17th September 2026

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Reactionary Reviews | Vuka Zulu | Umlilo


Vuka Zulu is the sound of an artist reaching maturity. This is a coded way to say that an artist has plateaued.

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by Roger Young

“White crosses on the church yard, I want to smash them all” – Against Me.

On Saturday 26th of September Ernst Roets, of AfriForum fame, under his new supervillain designation, Lex Libertas, an international advocacy project for Afrikaner rights, will be planting 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in Washington. These crosses symbolise the deaths of white people by violent crime in rural areas and farming areas of South Africa. Lex Libertas says each cross will carry the name of a victim, and its preliminary list contains more than 2,203 names. The event is being staged in partnership with the New York Young Republican Club, following a conference at the National Press Club on Friday the 25th. There will be no black crosses.

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Reactionary Reviews | Silas en die Ysbeer op Tafelberg | dir: Zandré Coetzer


Disclaimer: I am not an eight-year-old child.

Silas en die Ysbeer is a fantasy set in a world where a single mother can afford a two story apartment in Higgovale on a firefighter's salary.

Oh, shit, I mean...

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Reactionary Reviews | 1977 | Derek Gripper & Felix Laband


1977 is an ambient bromance a decade in the making. The first major work for Laband since Deaf Safari (at best The Soft White Hand often felt like outtakes from that album), this duet soundscape with Derek Gripper, the guitar master of transposition, is just fucking gorgeous. Perhaps collaboration is what Felix Laband has always been searching for.

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by Roger Young

Let's just call it what it is: Kevin Fraser performs blackface with his character Gladys, has been doing so for a long while – which is what this “best” of tour is all about. You would think, since Schuster's films were pulled from Showmax in 2020 amid a review of racially insensitive material, that Fraser would read the room. In his defence, that's hard to do from Australia.

In a reel dropped today on his socials the standup influencer, promoting his South African tour, you know the South Africa he loves so much that he moved to Australia, brings out his old favourite Gladys for a paid spot for Amazon.

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by Roger Young

“She’s deformed because of all the drugs and things.” – Helen Zille, who does not have a medical degree.

Roughly a month ago, on August 15th, the DA’s municipal campaign posted a video to its social media channels, with a viewer advisory warning for graphic content. The warning was warranted as the video showed Helen Zille potentially violating the privacy of an at-risk infant, and showing contextual details, as well as shoddy masking of the faces of the child’s alleged parents and other people struggling with substance dependency and in extreme poverty.

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an interview with Yugen Blakrok

You should basically be ashamed of yourself for not knowing who Yugen Blakrok is. It took a Facebook post a few weeks ago to remind me that she made this deep hip-hop that made me feel like I was listening to Digital Underground, or Massive Attack, or Lovage even, but you know, on shrooms, a music that was effortless and expanding. And then I got to wondering, where the fuck is Yugen Blakrok now?

And so...


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Reactionary Review | Landmyn | dir: Nico Scheepers


Landmyn ebbs and seethes through a winter family holiday by the beach.

Siblings Colette, Johan and Lisa, one returned from a career in London (or Scotland) apparently making coffee, the other an up and coming playwright and director (plainly the autobiographical hinge of the film – you can tell this because the other characters accuse him of being pretentious) and their younger sister, who is rebelling, presumably as she has dyed her hair red. The three of them find themselves at a beach house somewhere in the Cape, paid for by the older sister, who breaks the news that their mother is coming as well. Portent sets in. Who pays for what is where the faultlines lie.

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