Asher Gamedze & A Semblance: Of Return

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, and imagining new and old modes of freedom. Based in the independent music scenes of Cape Town and rooted in Pan-Africanism and Black Consciousness, 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 a grounding in local context, in collective work, in the sonic and social memory of South Africa and about reaching outward, imagining solidarities that extend beyond geographic and political borders. Musically, the record carries forward the lineages that shape Gamedze’s work and opens new spaces for communing. 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 shady club, a study group, a home.

The band on the album - Ru Slayen (percussion), Nobuhle Ashanti (keys & synth), Zwide Ndwandwe (bass), and Keegan Steenkamp (trumpet), with Gamedze on drums - formed as a social unit: a group for whom music is part of a broader shared life, full of playing, thinking, laughing, and struggling. 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 probing around notions of return as integral to any forward, future-oriented motion.

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 enacts both return and departure, or more precisely, extension/elaboration. This it does through a rootedness in the traditions and politics of the Cape underground, and opening a sonic invitation to dream, to struggle together, and, fundamentally, to assemble.