Of Return: Album Launch, 27.02.2026

Cape Town – We are excited to announce the launch event of Of Return, the debut album by local band A Semblance – Asher Gamedze’s latest project which includes Nobuhle Ashanti, Ru Slayen, Keegann Steenkamp, and Rob Scott.

Fresh off tours in southern Africa and western Europe in late 2025, the band is back on the ground for a hometown party: A Semblance will perform a live set of the album and Future Nostalgia – legendary local collectors and selectors will hold it down on the decks, keeping the dancefloor moving both before and after the band plays. Stiek uit!

Event details:
Venue: Colorbox Studios, 3 Industry St, Paarden Eiland
Date: Friday 27 February 2026

Times: Doors and DJs at 8pm; Show at 9.47pm; Close by 2am.
Merch: Records, CDs and Shirts will be on sale on the night
Tickets: Available on Fixr and at the door (if avail)
*Food and drinks available for purchase at venue

Let’s celebrate the release together with a bash! Come through, bring your people and please help us spread the word. If you would like to attend but are unable to for financial reasons please contact aaronwpeters@gmail.com and we’ll make a plan.

Co-presented and organised by Aaron Peters and Asher Gamedze.

With A Semblance: Of Return, South African drummer, composer, and bandleader Asher Gamedze gathers a close ensemble of longtime collaborators to explore what he calls “practices of assembly,” ways of coming together, making sound together, and imagining freedom together. Rooted in the independent music scenes of Cape Town and nourished by Pan-Africanist and Black Consciousness traditions, Of Return extends the political and musical commitments that have defined Gamedze’s work since Dialectic Soul (On The Corner, 2020), while opening a newly collective chapter in his practice, this time on Northern Spy Records.

Of Return is an album about grounding in local scenes, in collective work, in the sonic and social memory of home and about reaching outward, imagining solidarities that extend beyond geographic and political borders. Musically, the record carries forward the radical lineages that shape Gamedze’s work while opening new spaces for communal imagination. If Dialectic Soul, Turbulence and Pulse (International Anthem, 2022) and Constitution (International Anthem, 2024) were statements of direction, Of Return is a gathering place: a living room, a rehearsal, a rock club, a study circle, a home.

The band, Ru Slayen (percussion), Zwide Ndwandwe (bass), Nobuhle Ashanti (keys & synth), and Keegan Steenkamp (trumpet), with Gamedze on drums, formed as a social one: a group committed to playing, thinking, laughing, struggling, and spending time together as part of a shared life. And that ethos animates the music. Across the album’s two sides, Of Return moves with a grounded, searching energy, shifting between group vocals, groove-heavy ensemble passages, and moments of stark melodic clarity. The grooves are earthy and lived-in; the improvisations feel like conversations; the lyric fragments echo the project’s central question: What does it mean to return to history, to community, to each other in order to move forward?

The album’s title connects to the political vision articulated in Gamedze’s “From Cape to Cairo / Outwith” essay, written while preparing his guest curation for Le Guess Who? 2025. There, Gamedze traces the dual histories of the phrase “From Cape to Cairo”: first as a colonial fantasy of extraction and expansion, and then as a struggle slogan of Pan-African liberation, a phrase that “gestures toward the dream of liberating the continent from imperialist plunder, colonial and neo-colonial oppression.”

Of Return offers both a return and a departure: a rootedness in the practices and politics of the Cape underground, and a sonic invitation to struggle, dream, and assemble together across continents.

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