Devil's Cartel

Electronica

Johannesburg

Billboard

Johannesburg is known for its fast pace, deeply layered multi-cultural musical scenes and a slightly foreboding feeling when cruising the city at night. This makes for a perfect setting for the electro based outfit, Devils Cartel, to come from. Their sound is a mixture of cross-cultural and genre-twisting electro, probably best described as a fusion of dark trip-hop, sultry vocals and eclectic electronic sounds.

Devils Cartel is made up of mainly two musicians: Ian Holden and Louise Eksteen. They do make use of other musicians and do collaborations, but they are the two constants in this group.

Ian's career in the music industry started in 1992 as a DJ spinning deep house which triggered his first interests in music. He soon left DJing for good and started toying with computers and production. After successfully selling a track to a large corporation, he was able to study and fulfil his dream. While studying he started toying with the ideas of starting his own production company and after obtaining his formal qualification, Filtered Hues was born. Filtered Hues was mainly a fusion of Breaks, Trip Hop and Tech-House with one track landing on the SA based Tribal-Tech label, Afroboogie. His experience with Filtered Hues could most likely be billed as the foundations for Devils Cartel.

The other half of Devils Cartel, Louise Eksteen has worked on numerous production based projects since her early teens. These endeavours would include work alongside the electronic group Strange, dance-label Afroboogie, producer Simon Fine and AKA Lightsleeper (with whom she made her live debut at the Flux festival in 2003). She was also involved with Dark Templar, an electro-Goth band and Merchandize, an acid-jazz group. Louise performed numerous gigs in Pretoria and Johannesburg with the two aforementioned bands in 2003/4. In 2005 and early 2006 she performed all over London with Liquor Store, an Electronic rock duo, whilst recording the last few tracks for Devils Cartels Disengage.

Self taught bass player Lionel Naidoo has been playing bass and guitar since 1998. After cutting his teeth in various rock bands he began working the music circuit in Johannesburg in 2002. Since then he has been involved in a diverse range of musical projects/ (broadcast, recordings, musicals, teaching and occasionally playing bass.) He has played in various Jazz bands (Changes, Triology) and played at the tourism indaba in Durban 2005. Lionel also collaborates with musical duo Short & Root and a number of budding talents at Wits university.

In an interview with Taryn-Lee Beggar, on Music Inustry Online (www.mio.co.za) Ian said the following about DC and their place in SA:

DC has hopes of bridging the gap between genres especially electronic, which has not been represented as well as it should be in this country. Ian attributes this weakness mainly to a lack of understanding of the genre, but insists that at the end of the day, "its not about what genre you should or shouldnt be listening to, its about good music and I hope that the Devils Cartel fans can appreciate that."