BAD LIFE 2014

Fever Trails is the eponymous debut single from Fever Trails aka Nicolaas Van Reenan, a 24-year-old South African electronic composer who makes truly genre-defying, beautifully cinematic electronic masterpieces. We found him emerging out of Cape Town's seemingly bottomless well of incredibly talented, forward-thinking young creatives at a time where the city's scene has already given us so much of late.

Wow. Where to start? This is electronic music at it's most beautiful, but we're still not quite sure exactly what it is. 

We can imagine the BBC Radiophonic workshop cooking this up in a studio, only to rip off their 60's garb to reveal themselves as Orbital on synths, Flying Lotus on beats and Fever Trails at the helm sat proudly at the Steinway.

Like the very best electronic music, it's an escapist triumph. Both Fever Trails and Pattern Language transport you to somewhere else, creating vivid images, textures and atmospheres. 'Next level production' is a cliche which gets banded around all too often nowadays in electronic music but for Fever Trails the description falls short. This is otherwordly production, brimming with musicality.

Nicolaas Van Reenan is a lifelong student of music. In his debut offering we can sense his personal journey through indie rock, the Shangaan and Limpopo sounds of his continent and a musical epiphany on his travels in Europe. Finally it was his first festival experience where he fell in love with electronic music, Glastonbury 2008, where he lost a weekend to Shangri La.