Umbrella of sound and resistance

Septober Energy is hard to categorise. Formed in 2023 in the wake of loss, the Johannesburg–Cape Town–spanning collective has quickly established itself as a fluid, multigenerational space where DJs, archivists, scholars and experimental musicians converge. Less a fixed crew than a living ecosystem, Septober Energy operates as what co-founder Naledi Chai describes as “an umbrella for other collectives,” one that privileges collaboration, curiosity and deep listening.

At its heart, the project is both homage and intervention: a memorial to a fallen friend and a deliberate reimagining of how Black sonic histories can circulate in the present. The collective’s name is not accidental. Septober Energy takes its cue from the sprawling 1971 double album Septober Energy by the British jazz/progressive rock big band Centipede, a once-off musical experiment produced by Robert Fripp under the direction of Keith Tippett.

For Chai, the reference was less about nostalgia and more about method. “I came up with the name and I was kind of listening to that project at the time,” she explains. “It was interesting for me that they kind of pulled all these artists from different parts of music, from different parts of the world, from different parts of sound and got them together to make this record.” That spirit of unlikely convergence became the blueprint.

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“I thought that it would be fitting for us to do that,” she continues, “because we were also kind of gathering musicians, DJs, writers, scholars, academics and bringing them into this vinyl collecting space where they could come in and explore the sound of other DJs and explore their own sounds.” If the name carries archival weight, the collective’s story of origin is deeply personal. Septober Energy emerged shortly after the death of their friend and collaborator Malesela “Joey” Modiba, also known as Lirubishi (and sometimes Joy Mode), who passed away in 2023. “Septober Energy came about as sort of a commemoration or like a getting together of DJs and musicians,” Chai says.

“We formed it after we lost our friend in the community, Joey.” “Shortly after we buried him, we kind of got together,” she recalls. “It was sort of in memory of Joey, because this is definitely something that he would have done. This is something he would have made himself. This is something that he would have wanted.” What might have remained a once-off memorial instead crystallised into an ongoing platform.

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