In 1995 a club opened in Cape Town called the Funktion. It was a year after the first democratic elections and apartheid laws that had determined where people could live, who they could associate with, and who they could have sex with, were in the process of being dismantled. The early 90's also saw the withdrawal of the "cultural boycott", a global initiative that had urged artists, musicans, etc. to withhold their work from South Africa. The music scene prior to 1995 in Cape Town's inner city was dominated by hard house and trance, played at huge warehouse raves and clubs alike, and very much the preserve of white South Africans with money. As more and more people began to be exposed to more and more forms of music, and as the inner city became more integrated, small nights promoted by DJ's began to spring up, playing anything from funk and soul, to drum and bass to hip hop to deep house. All these small nights would eventually coalesce around one space and that was the Funktion. I was fortunate enough to be one of the resident DJ's for the two years the Funktion ran, before it all imploded (a tale for another day). And these were some of the tunes: