kagablog

“It was when I found out I could make mistakes that I knew I was on to something” said saxophonist Ornette Coleman when asked to explain the genesis of his fabled Harmolodic theory of improvisation. It’s a deceptively simple enough premise: fucking up as a way for a composer frustrated by jazz’s 12 bar blues soloist pigeonholes and classical music’s canonised compositional cul-de-sac to tap into the controlled chaos beating at the (he)art of all improvisation.

It’s also precisely what made the recent “Pop Shield evening of Improvised Experimental Music and Film by Some Umlungus” held at the Independent Armchair in Observatory, Cape Town such fun. Fun? Not exactly a sentiment you’d normally associate with so-called experimental music. But then the improvised collaborations between electronica poster boy Felix Laband, legendary Kalahari Surfer dub surgeon Warrick Sony, the Buckfever Underground’s abstract guitar adventurer Righard Kapp and prolific cultural provocateur Aryan Kaganof wasn’t your average muso jam session masquerading as some kind of high art happening.

Not that the audience initially noticed. “Oh, he’s obviously been listening to Tom Waits” lampooned a mate of mine two minutes into Kaganof’s set of spoken word poetry accompanied by Kapp’s atmospherically sketched soundtrack of ‘peripheral’ electric and acoustic guitar sounds sourced via no-input mixing desk. I cringed. Show some fucking respect dude. This guy is up on stage doing his thing and you’re here whinging because he’s borrowed some of Tom Wait’s barfly Beat poetry spiel? Shit, if you were actually listening to his micro-melodramas of booze, broads and being bummed out you’d hear he’s channelling Charles Bukowksi’s gleeful misanthropy too.

Such a knee-jerk attitude exemplifies one of the major problems facing any musicians in South Africa who refuse to serve up an easily digestible ‘pop’ entertainment package of ‘phat’ electro beat sedatives or colour by number ‘experimental’ sales pitches for punters to tune in and drop out to. Audience expectation: a refusal to step out of our pre-programmed comfort zones, and an unwillingness to leave our listening prejudices at the door and actively engage with the experimental improvisations emanating from the stage.

So what if you’re lost? Listening to Sony and Laband’s collaboration I certainly was. The sheer obtuseness of the sonic noodle soup that the pair was sculpting on stage initially had me perplexed. “Check out Laband - he’s lost in space” I quipped to a fellow journalist, quickly completing the script: “Sony’s worried. He’s struggling to glue it together”. Thinking somehow I had ‘it’. But knowing that projecting my own insecurities about not knowing whether I knew what the hell was happening just wasn’t going to cut it.

“There’s a name for this genre, you know: laptop folk” I chuckled to a fellow journalist. Neatly nailed with a cheesy grin…and utter bollocks. But what was I supposed to do to make sense of a shambolically structured sonic tableau where cryptic dub, fractured glitches and a lucky packet of sampled plunderphonica threatened to converse together, before imploding into a clash of cognitively discordant monologues?

Listen. Right, of course. So I didn’t get that electro-acoustic strum ‘n sampled strings thing much, got to be honest. Had me wondering what James Webb jamming with Jack Johnson might sound like for a second there. But fuck it. No naming of parts was going to save me from understanding why the hell guitarist Righard Kapp’s plucked and pedal fiddled fx and Laband and Sony’s hard-wired hesitation suddenly had me feeling uneasy. Had me remembering the horror of every conversation I’ve ever had with an acquaintance I’ve ever wanted to be more than friends with…..

Was the interrupted dialogue, the lost conversations and frustrated narrative lines of flight intentional? Maybe so. But maybe these improvisers were just not afraid to fuck up.

miles keylock