kagablog

UNYAZI – ELECTRONIC MUSIC SYMPOSIUM AND FESTIVAL 2005

September saw the inauguration of South Africa’s first Electronic
Music & Arts festival. The first of its kind in Africa, Unyazi drew
talent from across the globe, featuring the gifts of Louis Moholo,
George Lewis, Zim Ngqawana, Halim El-Dabh, amongst dozens of others.

Hosted by Wits University, Unyazi is an off-shoot of New Music SA, the
local representative of the International Society for Contemporary
Music, which promotes and fosters the pursuit of new musical
languages, passion and innovation in composition. Unyazi focusses on
the increasingly powerful role electronic instrumentation plays in
imaginative contemporary composition.

Spanning four brimming days the festival included visual electronic art,
conferences, various workshops, and mind-blowing performances of man
and machine playing off each others’ possibilities.

A defining moment of the Fest occurred when I walked into an
auditorium, its stage occupied by what appeared to be some form of
exhibit – an array of traditional Classical and African instruments,
each on a mounting-block, each attached to various wires, nuts &
bolts. A Post-Modern museum exhibit?
Approaching the people seated around the exhibit, I noticed they were
all staring, transfixed, at the stage – which was when I realised the
instruments were in motion..
Suddenly it hit me that what I had thought to be a rather beautiful
backing soundtrack was in fact being played live on-stage, and no
musician in sight! Which was when Maxime Rioux strolled over to
introduce me to his self-conducting orchestra.

DAY 1.

“The present-day composer refuses to die!” Edgard Varese’

Arriving late, significantly so, having just missed the great Carlo
Mombelli (on bass & loops), who improvised with South American
multi-instrumentalist Joao Orrecchia, I sulked over to the Listening
Room.

Hosted by Darius Weinberg, the Listening Room presented pre-recorded
compositions to be experienced without visual distraction: enter
darkened room. Here various composers explore the divide between
instrumental, natural and digital sounds, with Eduardo Miranda’s
‘Robotapithecos’ re-processing samples of various monkey vocalisations
into humanoid singing and more abstract sounds. A highlight here was
Mark Applebaum’s funky remix of the legendary John Zorn’s Jazz-Metal
piece ‘Snagglepuss’. Although interesting, the Listening Room sessions
were too abstract to sustain my attention during the festival.

The three live performances that followed set the bar for the fest,
with the audiences volleyed between awe and delight.
My notebook contains the following scribble on the first performance:
‘Matthew Ostrowski conducts a hyper-detailed ocean of digital sound
and arranges its strings and belches of melody with some kinda
infra-sound glove, creating a self-improvising digital cosmos..’

Indeed. Mr Ostrowski, New York-based electronica artist, approached
his orchestra-pit – a lone table fitted with a single Apple laptop,
beside it what appeared to be a stylised mechanical forearm. Snapped
on his glove.
For the following half-hour the dumbstruck audience experienced less a
‘one-man band’ than a one-man galaxy of sound.
Armed with a lone digito-electronic glove, which he moves in front of
a digital sensor (the abovementioned ‘forearm’), to select and/or
suppress pre-recorded streams of sound and melody, Mr Ostrowski
conducted and improvised the seemingly infinite layers of digital
sound emitted by the Apple’s hard-drive.
At one point a hyper-pixellated burst of sound swoons into a school of
dolphin-clicks before shifting into digital birdsong; all the while Mr
Ostrowski’s gloved ring-finger harnesses, then redirects, and army of
percussion (its left flank resembling melody).
The conclusion of the 35 minute piece, aptly entitled ‘Insomnia’, was
met with significant silence before anyone had recovered enough to
begin clapping. And long was the applause.

Next up was Brendon Bussy, representing one of SA’s most
forward-thinking record labels, Open Record. Of his two pieces, the
first was the most exciting. Accompanied by a trumpeter, Bussy
improvised using his laptop: The trumpet’s melodies were sampled into
the PC, then manipulated in real time to accompany the trumpeter in
unexpected ways – now harmonising with, now challenging his melodies.

Back in the Main Theatre, Yannis Kiriakides, successful international
DJ and composer, presented his six ‘Portraits’.
The ‘Portraits’ are compositions based on six very different
interviews/conversations, where the nature of a given interview, and
its protagonists, define the composition. Using the mood and emotional
setting of a given interview, Yannis structured melody and beats
accordingly: An interview with a 7-yr old European boy, on his
ambitions in life, conducted in the city, becomes infused with the
rhythms of a child’s wonder and excitement – city-sounds, now distant,
now menacingly Huge, inform the composition.
The twist to his approach was that Kyriakides employed only the human
sounds occuring between words to lead his musical accompaniment. The
‘human’ element was reduced to the sounds surrounding, anticipating,
and following actual speech: Extra-linguistic sound becoming the
emotional cues for his compositions. So in the stand-out ‘Portrait’, a
child interviewing a pensioned clerk, we listen to geriatric breathing
becoming a drummer’s brush-strokes: The aged pensioner’s wheezing
pauses and gulps become an orchestra of skin, coloured by child-like
glints representing the interviewer’s youth.. Masterful!

The debut evening was rightly concluded by Warrick Sony, aka Kalahari
Surfers, considered the the godfather of South African Electronica.

Generally associated with suave production skills and inventive
composition, Mr Sony’s audacious improvisation, utilising three
turn-tables simultaneously, took me by surprise. The fifteen minute
‘Continental Drift’, which would explore the harmonies between
avant-garde European Classical and traditional African music, which I
naively anticipated to be a pre-recorded song, turned into a masterful
improvisation.
Juggling two vinyl- and one cd-turntable effortlessly, or so it
seemed, Mr Sony sculpted Karlheinz Stockhausen (icon of early 20th
century electro-classical music)’s abstract staccato and Ladysmith
Black Mambaso’s creamy ululations into unlikely unison. At one stage
slowing Ladysmith down to warbled rhythm, Sony tweaked Stockhausen’s
crude angles into melody, dropping in a Fish-Eagle’s cry as trumpet,
for good measure.

The festival’s tone was set.
And set for explosion into unexpected melody..

BUT WHAT IS UNYAZI, AND WHY?

“Composing is the act of decorating Time” Frank Zappa

Unyazi promotes an appreciation of music seated in that original
aboriginal value – music as interaction with gods, as language of
passion and the profound. For the last century African music’s
spirituality has been hitched and hiked into American superficiality,
Britney Spears’ beats blasphemically appropriated from the original
sexual thump of divine drum.. even 2 Pac’s virile frustrations
couldn’t transcend the inherent materialism of thug ‘n bitch Gangsta
Rap..

The supposed abstractness of experimental composition is nothing but a
symptom of our conditioning to the vulgar superficiality of popular
music. Unyazi seeks to re-acquaint music with its roots: The
spiritual, the striving-beyond profane communication – and to ground
this passion in the contemporary.
As Pops Mohammed has said, “Fusing new futuristic sounds with ancient
cultures is about one of the only ways I know that can take these
beautiful African sounds into the next century.”

Dimitri Voudouris, festival organiser, asserts that the event is
geared not at commercial entertainment, but the promotion of
passionate, original composers:
“The festival will only take place every 2 years as this will allow
for development at ground level in South Africa, giving composers and
musicians alike an opportunity to create high quality work.”
Unyazi is therefore simultaneously a celebration of music’s higher
aims, and fertile workshop for dedicated, if under-nourished, aspirant
composers.

DAY 2.

“Computers don’t have enough Africa in them” Brian Eno

Several conferences and discussions took place on Friday. Lukas
Ligetti, world-renowned percussionist and experimental performer,
whose extensive musical travels and collaborations throughout Africa
have promoted the creative relationship between contemporary
electronica and traditional African musics, chaired a discussion on
the aforesaid relationship and its possibilities.
Maxime Rioux, creator of the automaton, a collection of Classical,
African and ‘found’ instruments (eg. tin cans, Coca Cola bottles),
which play themselves via electrical currents stimulating precise
movements, discussed his personal approach to music. Travelling
between countries, Maxime adapts his automaton to incorporate the
given culture’s traditional instruments, in this way his travels shift
his personal musical language in a way that channels directly into his
self-performing compositions.

Later that night Maxime tells me that he has spent the last decade
crafting his automaton, and informs me that his new interest lies in
the concept of ‘inaudible sounds’, and the various psycho-musical
possibilities of incorporating such ‘invisible’ sounds into
composition.
Invisible music played by invisible musicians, cheers Maxime.!

At the Viewing Room I was introduced to our very own Digital Arts
terrorist, Aryan Kaganof. Kaganof is a prolific film-composer, winner
of various awards both locally and internationally, whose digital
works question and interrogate the bounds between visual, aural and
conceptual languages: always stimulating, often controversial. But
more on Kaganof later.

The centre-piece of Unyazi was the performances of Halim El-Dabh. His
very presence capturing the spirit of Unyazi, and blessing it, the
84-yr old Egyptian composer and multi-instrumentalist was the first
African to utilize electronic sounds in composition. Globally
considered Egypt’s foremost living classical composer, Mr El-Dabh has
personally worked with Igor Stravinsky, and had close associations
with pioneers of avant-garde classical music like Aaron Copland and
Edgard Varese’. Utilizing wire-recorders for electronic composition as
early as 1944, Mr El-Dabh is renowned both for his expertise in
ancient Egyptian language and musical notation, and his consistent
promotion of musical exchange across cultures and historical divide.

His first performance aptly featured Pops Mohammed, who opened on
mbira and vocals, soon joined by Mr. El-Dabh on various African
instruments and voice. But it was the next performance that stole the
show.
‘Michael and the Dragon’, created in 1959, was originally composed as
an electronic piece, where white-noise elements violently interact
with horn-like segments, depicting a battle between Archangel (horn)
and Dragon (white-noise). For this performance, the brilliant George
Lewis improvised over the original – his trombone improv, violently
reacting to sudden assaults of electronica, harmonising inventively
over calmer segments, brought an authentic immediacy to the original
conception.
A Tour-de-Force of virtuoso playing and Halim El-Dabh’s fertile compositions!

DAY 4

“What was wrong was not me, but the piano..” John Cage

Despite the fact that no events overlapped, allowing one to catch
everything Unyazi had on offer, the sheer intensity involved meant
that one simply could not absorb all one saw and heard. I gave myself
a breather, skipping Saturday, returning for Sunday’s culmination of
Unyazi.

Kaganof’s second set of films were extraordinary, to say the least.
The first film, ‘Two heads are better than one’, was a visually
stunning contemplation of the divide between sexual beauty and
pornography. A world premiere, completed just in time for Unyazi, it
was also attended by electronic composer Joel Assaizky, who created
the soundtrack.

A visual remix of Guto Bussab’s short film ‘The Incubus’, the film is
based on footage of Czech porn actress Sylvia Saint performing
fellatio. Now, before everyone runs away screaming.. all the
pornography was kept off-screen, digitally silenced. The entire film
consists of medium close-up shots of Sylvia, manipulated in
split-screen to become a liquid rhythm of feminine beauty in duet.
While the nature of her movements betray the actual event, the
audience is visually presented with nothing but a beautiful woman’s
head, neck and shoulders in sensual motion. A thought-provoking,
visually gorgeous piece, executed with a musician’s sense of rhythm
and harmony.

The most powerful film in this set was an open-ended documentary
called Merbow beyond snuff, moving from the Japanese ‘Noise DJ’
phenomenon, where audiences gather in grimy neon-lit clubs to listen
to DJ’s compete to make the most creative, abrasive collage of noise
possible, to controversial film-maker Masami Akita’s documentation
of painfully beautiful, painfully young Japanese women committing
‘Hara Kiri’, politely described as suicide by disembowlment. A piece
conceptually based on Kurt Schwitter’s Merzbau, a house of illusions,
flights of stairs leading into nowhere and corners turning back on
themselves; a philosophical query into the meaning of position, boundary and
presence, the culminating footage plunged me into an appreciation of
well-aimed censorship.
Always stimulating, often controvertial. Kaganof’s best works only
really kick in after the credits roll.

george lewis and zim ngqawana

George Lewis, virtuoso trombonist and experimental composer,
decades-long member of the famed AACM (Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians) in Chicago, was once again involved in a
highlight of the festival. Appearing with legend Louis Moholo on
drums, Lewis describes their 20 minute performance as “human
improvisors engaged in dialogue with a computer-driven, interactive
‘virtual pianist’”.
Had these giants appeared in free-form improvisation with each other
alone, the performance would have been awesome. Louis Moholo radiates
percussion, one imagines him hitting a single downbeat and inspiring
his kit to play on for another ten minutes. Seeing him reminded me of
first hearing Tony Williams circa Miles’ ‘In a Silent Way’ sessions,
seemingly playing five kits simultaneously, in crisp economy.
Incredible stuff.
Their ‘virtual pianist’ is a program designed to analyse the
musicians’ playing, and respond based on perceived structural
possibilities – at times it seemed the virtual improvisor was leading
Lewis and Moholo. A mind-blowing set, and engaging throughout, no mean
feat for a robotic pianist!

Next up was the inventive, cheeky fusion outfit ‘Skid’, featuring
Jonathan Crossley on guitar. Chunky retro-funk riffs meet electronic
samples and drum triggers, ‘Skid’ create a climate where anything can
alter the course of their songs, without losing direction. Best bit
here was their epic fusion arrangement of B-grade 80’s TV show, ‘The
A-Team’s theme song, tongues firmly in cheek. Concluding their
performance was an ode to the 2010 soccer bid, kicking three
percussion-rigged soccer balls around in mock physical theatre.

Over the course of the weekend Luc Houtkamp, Dutch sax virtuoso and
electro-acoustic composer, had been utilising workshops to assemble a
group called POW, made up from Wits music students. POW did free-form
improvisation conducted by Luc. In one piece they transformed racist
censorship (a recording of PW Botha announcing the barring of the
ANC), into a stimulus for unrestrained musical expression; PW’s
remixed rants triggering the ensemble’s flourishes – a wonderful
statement. Next up Luc invited Mr.Ostrowski onstage for a highly
abstract laptop duet, soon augmented by Austrian guitar whizz Burkhard
Stangl’s acoustic contributions.

That one went way over my head – an intense conclusion to a
mind-blowing festival. Too exhausted to catch the finale of
sound-sculptors
James Webb and James Sey, I headed on home.

It would be difficult to overestimate the value of Unyazi, both as
fertile interactive classroom for tomorrow’s composers, and
hyper-stimulating showpiece for what can be done in the world of sound
and art.
My only complaint is existential.
I find myself wanting to revisit Unyazi, as one does a beautiful,
highly intricate Jazz composition – finding more layers, more melodic
and rhythmic relationships on each replay..

But, as with said composition, I find Unyazi still playing in the back
of my head.

mick raubenheimer