The description "melting pot" is used so often it's a cliché. But 340ml's music really is, yes, a melting pot — of everything from reggae, dub and bossa nova to hints of rock. It reflects the lives of four men from Malawi — Paulo Jorge Chibanga, Rui Soeiro, Tiago Paulo and Pedro Pinto — who have quietly become one of South Africa's most innovative groups.

We catch up with frontman, Pedro Pinto, to talk growing up in Maputo, playing grunge and thrash metal, being electrocuted on stage, bedbugs, and Oppikoppi's dust.

You're all from Mozambique but 340ml only formed when you were all in South Africa. How did that happen?

We all grew up in Mozambique — we're from Maputo — and we've known each other since our early teens I suppose. We all played in different garage bands and rock and grunge cover bands at the time grunge was at its peak. We ended up in Joburg to study — not at the same time — and we just basically hooked up. We had access to a small classroom and we had instruments with us so we started jamming purely for ourselves because we were mainly studying at the time. And it just started getting serious after that.

Grunge? Really?

We probably started playing Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots covers in Mozambique when we were maybe 14 to 16. By the time we got to South Africa to go to university the whole grunge thing had blown over. Not only that — growing up in Mozambique we were bombarded with all sorts of different music, be it from Brazil, from Europe, from the States, from everywhere. Basically everything we could get our hands on, because at the time it was really difficult.

There weren’t really any record stores in Maputo — we were in the middle of a civil war and music was very scarce. So everything we could get our hands on we absorbed like a sponge. So be it reggae, bossa nova, samba, a lot of African sounds as well. But as we grew older the reggae dub started to creep in very slowly and it eventually took over.

So, growing up, how did you get your hands on all this music?

We would depend on radio and every time someone would go overseas on a holiday they would always come back with these mix tapes of stuff they'd recorded off radio or CDs, this new fresh music that was happening in the rest of the world. And whatever they brought back would do the rounds. We'd copy everything and distribute it to everyone.

It was a really interesting time because regardless of your age, of your race, of your background, of your class you'd get to listen to pretty much anything. So you'd get, for example, a lot of black kids listening to thrash metal. Paulo, our drummer, was actually part of this heavy, heavy thrash metal band at one time.