kagablog

“It’s not a question of Africa or America”
Interview with the saxophonist Zim Ngqawana

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Forty-two-year-old Zim Ngqawana studied jazz at the University of Natal before going to the United States to train with the likes of Max Roach and Wynton Marsalis. On his return to South Africa, he toured with Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela whilst also developing his own style. His record collection comprises innumerable works by John Coltrane, along with Mozart and the Pakistani musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Kahn. Open to everything and in search of spirituality, Zim Ngquawana considers himself as a free man. This practicing Muslim refuses ready-made formulae and labels. On his latest record, Zimphonic Suites, he performs the traditional songs of his ethnic group, the Xhosas. His approach refuses to limit his music to being specifically South African. He rejects local colour whilst at the same time challenging globalisation. He doesn’t play jazz; he plays music. He isn’t African; he’s universal.

What do you think of the older generation of South African jazz musicians, the Chris McGregors or the Winston Mankukus, who died unheard of and at times penniless?
The system always sought to suppress jazz as an art form because jazz addresses important social questions, because it helps you to think and be free. Those musicians constitute my heritage.

How do you answer your critics who accuse you of being too influenced by America, of not being African enough?
It’s not a question of Africa or America. The American masters belong to my people. Duke Ellington is my father. John Coltrane is my father. I have to connect with all the people in the Diaspora who do the same thing as me, who practice the same form of expression, based on the same social conditions. I don’t want to discriminate, or limit myself to South Africa. The world is not South Africa.

Has the country’s opening since 1994 significantly changed South African jazz?
No, because most of the great innovators were around before, and were often in exile. Music and thought has deteriorated since 1994 for economic and political reasons.

What reasons do you mean?
The way life is taken hostage so that people do not realise the meaning of their lives. The modern slavery that exists all over the world, people programmed to sleep, work, and consume. People whom the artists entertain. I’m not here for entertainment’s sake.

Are you angry?
I empathise. I’m not angry anymore, otherwise I wouldn’t play the music I play. Anger is dangerous; it can consume you completely. You have to channel it, to understand it and use it as a stimulant in order to affront life. You can get the best of yourself from it.

Do you ever consider leaving the country?
I have already left, spiritually speaking. Johannesburg remains my base for logistical reasons, a place where I can plan and accomplish other things, such as family life, which I need to stay balanced. When I say family, I mean all people who think and who want to attain positive goals.

Are other jazz musicians a part of your family?
There is no jazz community here. It’s frustrating. That’s why I had such a good time in Paris at the last La Villette jazz festival. I met American musicians, critics, people who were sensitive and aware of what is going on in the world, activists. I also went to visit the dead; I went to see Frederic Chopin and Edith Piaf’s graves.

What do you think of jazz adaptations of traditional maskanda?
There’s no such thing as maskanda or anything else! Music is as free as the air… We live in a technical world where tradition is considered underdeveloped. That’s all nonsense. We need to develop technicality, technology to be compatible everywhere…

Do you think you are better appreciated abroad than at home?
Africa, South Africa, is the only place I have problems in playing my music.

Why?
Because people carry on talking when you play… Africans need to understand their reality and adapt. It’s all very well preaching the African renaissance and not putting it into practice. If you want to be primitive, why carry on living in chic neighbourhoods? We ought to dress in our skins and beads, our traditional clothing, and go to the office in them… Tradition needs to be transformed, reworked to be made compatible with our urban lifestyle, our world, and our reality. We don’t have any other choice: I can’t go to Paris on horseback! We need to rethink things in general, not just music, if we want to play a role in the global village.

this interview first published on africultures.com

1. Simplicity

Where everything becomes simple is the most desirable place to be. But, like Wittgenstein and his ‘harmless contradiction’, you have to remember how you got there. The simplicity must contain the memory of how hard it was to achieve. (The relevant Wittgenstein quotation is from the posthumously published ‘Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics’: “The pernicious thing is not, to produce a contradiction in the region where neither the consistent nor the contradictory proposition has any kind of work to do; no, what is pernicious is: not to know how one reached the place where contradiction no longer does any harm”.)

In 1957 when I left The Royal Academy of Music in London complex compositional techniques were considered indispensable. I acquired some -and still carry them around like an infection that I am perpetually desirous of curing. Sometimes the temptation occurs to me that if I were to infect my students with it I would at last be free of it myself.

2. Integrity

What we do in the actual event is important -not only what we have in mind. Often what we do is what tells us what we have in mind.

The difference between making the sound and being the sound. The professional musician makes the sounds (in full knowledge of them as they are external to him); AMM is their sounds (as ignorant of them as one is about one’s own nature).

3. Selflessness

To do something constructive you have to look beyond yourself. The entire world is your sphere if your vision can encompass it. Self-expression lapses too easily into mere documentation -’I record that this is how I feel’. You should not be concerned with yourself beyond arranging a mode of life that makes it possible to remain on the line, balanced. Then you can work, look out beyond yourself. Firm foundations make it possible to leave the ground.

4. Forbearance

Improvising in a group you have to accept not only the frailties of your fellow musicians, but also your own. Overcoming your instinctual revulsion against whatever is out of tune (in the broadest sense).

5. Preparedness for no matter what eventuality (Cage’s phrase) or simply Awakeness.

I can best illustrate this with a special case of clairvoyant prediction. The trouble with clairvoyant prediction is that you can be absolutely convinced that one of two alternatives is going to happen, and then suddenly you are equally convinced of the other. In time this oscillation accelerates until the two states merge in a blur. Then all you can say is: I am convinced that either p or not-p, that either she will come or she won’t, or whatever the case is about. Of course there is an immense difference between simply being aware that something might or might not occur, and a clairvoyant conviction that it will or won’t occur. No practical difference but a great difference in feeling. A great intensity in your anticipation of this or that outcome. So it is with improvisation. “He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange headfulness the faintest paleness of the sky” (Walter Pater). This constitutes awakeness.

6. Identification with nature

Drifting through life: being driven through life; neither constitutes a true identification with nature. The best is to lead your life, and the same applies in improvising: like a yachtsman to utilise the interplay of natural forces and currents to steer a course.

My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician’s pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world (rather as Shelley does in Prometheus Unbound). All playing can be seen as an extension of singing; the voice and its extensions represent the musical dimension of men, women, children and animals. According to some authorities smoking is an extension of thumbsucking; perhaps the fear of cancer will eventually drive us back to thumbsucking. Possibly in an ideal future us animals will revert to singing, and leave wood, glass, metal, stone etc. to find their own voices, free of our torturings. (I have heard tell of devices that amplify to the point of audibility the sounds spontaneously occurring in natural materials).

7. Acceptance of Death

From a certain point of view improvisation is the highest mode of musical activity, for it is based on the acceptance of music’s fatal weakness and essential and most beautiful characteristic -its transcience.

The desire always to be right is an ignoble taskmaster, as is the desire for immortality. The performance of any vital action brings us closer to death; if it didn’t it would lack vitality. Life is a force to be used and if necessary used up. “Death is the virtue in us going to its destination” (Lieh Tzu).

Cornelius Cardew
Towards an ethics of improvisation
complete document is here

The problems of recording

I have touched on this problem twice already. I said that documents such as tape-recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot of course convey any sense of time and place. And later, that it is impossible to record with any fidelity a kind of music that is actually derived from the room in which it is taking place -its size, shape, acoustical properties, even the view from the window, and that what a recording produces is a separate phenomenon, something really much stranger than the playing itself, since what we hear on tape or disc is indeed the same playing but divorced from its natural context.

A remark of Wittgenstein’s gives us a clue as to the real root of the problem. In the Tractatus he writes; “The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial international relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common”. (4.014) This logical structure is just what an improvisation lacks, hence it cannot be scored nor can it be recorded.

All the general technical problems of recording are exacerbated in the recording of improvisation, but they remain technical, and with customary optimism we may suppose that one day they will be solved. However, even when these problems are solved, together with all those that may arise in the meantime, it will still be impossible to record this music, for several reasons.

Simply that very often the strongest things are not commercially viable on the domestic market. Pure alcohol is too strong for most people’s palates. Atomic energy is acceptable in peacetime for supplying the electricity grid, but housewives would rebel against the idea of atomic converters in their own kitchens. Similarly, this music is not ideal for home listening. It is not a suitable background for social intercourse. Besides, this music does not occur in a home environment, it occurs in a public environment, and its force depends to some extent on public response. For this reason too it cannot happen fully in a recording studio; if there is hope for a recording it must be a recording of a public performance.

Who can be interested purely in sound, however high its ‘fidelity’? Improvisation is a language spontaneously developed amongst the players and between players and listeners. Who can say in what consists the mode of operation of this language? Is it likely that it is reducible to electrical impulses on tape and the oscillation of a loudspeaker membrane? On this reactionary note, I abandon the topic.

News has to travel somehow and tape is probably in the last analysis just as adequate a vehicle as hearsay, and certainly just as inaccurate.

cornelius cardew
towards an ethic of improvisation

Published by DATANOM
Edited by Pelle Krøgholt
ISBN 87-988955-0-8
Copyright 2002 by Sangild & DATANOM
All rights reserved
Contact: datanom@datanom.com
Link to Publisher: DATANOM

Noise can blow your head out. Noise is rage. Noise is ecstatic. Noise is psychedelic. Noise is often on the edge between annoyance and bliss. Noises are many things. Noise is a difficult concept to deal with.

Some would say that it is no longer meaningful to talk about noise as something special, since we have finally reached a state in which all sounds are equal. That may be so for certain avant-garde artists and advanced listeners, but I will assert that we still hear a difference between noise and more traditional musical sounds. Noises are the sounds which used to be denounced as non-musical. To include noise in music thus still has an effect and bears a certain aesthetic power. That power is the topic of this essay. To give an exhaustive explanation of it, though, is not only beyond the limits of an essay, but seems to be fundamentally impossible due to the evasiveness of the matter.1 There is a constant discrepancy between the essentially indescribable object and the attempt to verbalize and understand it. It is my hope that the following reflections are nevertheless able to sketch out an approach to understanding the important part noise plays in the music of today.

After defining noise and giving a brief history of noise in music, I will take a closer look at Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Merzbow and Curd Duca as four very different aesthetic approaches to noise. Ranging from aggressive ecstasy to soft intimacy, from melodic sweetness to abstract hard-core noise, from the guitar to the computer, these examples serve to indicate the variety of noise in both rock music and electronica. Reflecting these in a broader perspective I will then turn to philosophical concepts such as the sublime, the Dionysian, multiplicity, and the abject.

What is noise?

Etymologically, the term “noise” in different Western languages (støj, bruit, Geräusch, larm etc.) refers to states of aggression, alarm and tension and to powerful sound phenomena in nature such as storm, thunder and the roaring sea. It is worth noting in particular that the word “noise” comes from Greek nausea, referring not only to the roaring sea, but also to seasickness, and that the German Geräusch is derived from rauschen (the sough of the wind), related to Rausch (ecstasy, intoxication), thus pointing towards some of the aesthetic, bodily effects of noise in music.

A single definition of noise is not possible; instead I will provide three basic definitions: an acoustic, a communicative and a subjective definition.

A. Acoustic noise

In the field of acoustics the concept of noise is in principle purely physically defined. Noises are sounds that are impure and irregular, neither tones nor rhythm - roaring, pealing, blurry sounds with a lot of simultaneous frequencies, as opposed to a rounded sound with a basic frequency and its related overtones. To name different kinds of noise, synaesthetic metaphors are derived from the spectrum of color so that ‘white noise’ is a signal ideally containing all of the audible frequencies at the same time, like an untuned radio. A signal in which certain frequencies are preferred to others is thus called “colored noise,” ranging from “violet noise” (a bias on the high frequencies) to “purple noise” (a bias on the low frequencies).

B. Communicative noise

In communication theory, noise is that which distorts the signal on its way from transmitter to recipient. There will always be an element of distortion, either externally or internally, coming from the medium itself. In music noise is often originally a malfunction in the instruments or electronics (a disturbance of the clear signal), which is then reversed into a positive effect. The distortion effect of the electric guitar, for instance, which is now ubiquitous, was originally an overload of the amplifier, causing it to fray the sound. In the early sixties, guitarists began to deliberately construct this distortion by fiddling with the amplifiers, and soon the industry marketed pedals with names like “fuzztone”, “overdrive”, and “distortion” as an easy way to obtain the same effect.
In the same way electronica artists work with different sorts of overloads of the devices, or they deliberately induce errors with unpredictable results. One of the methods is giving the midi too many signals for it to handle, resulting in an uncontrollable musical output. Another technique is the obvious one of creating distortion by overloading a digital amplifier.

When you reverse a disturbance into a part of the music itself, it is not smoothly integrated but infuses the music with a tension. There is still a play on the formerly negative relation between noise and signal when a noise is legitimated. This tension is an important part of the musical power of noise.

C. Subjective noise

“Unpleasant sounds” – this is the common and colloquial, but also the most intricate, meaning of noise. And it is obviously a subjective definition. There are very few general rules as to which sounds are unpleasant (the higher the frequency and the louder the sound, the more unpleasant it feels); it is to a great extent a matter of personal idiosyncrasy and cultural-historical situation.

An important factor in coming to dislike certain sounds is the extent to which they are considered meaningful. The noise of the roaring sea, for example, is not far from white radio noise, but is nonetheless not considered unpleasant and irritating. We still seek meaning in nature and therefore the roaring of the sea is a blissful sound, whereas radio noise (even if we were to hear it as indistinguishable from the sea) is normally considered a disturbance. Artists, who deal with noise in their music, as well as their audience, have a different approach to white noise, no longer considering it a nuisance.

One might conclude from this that the subjective definition is not relevant to the aesthetic use of noise in music. But, as I have already suggested, that would be a hasty dismissal of the important tension you get from infusing the formerly negative. To reach a point where a harsh, white noise is not considered unpleasant demands a training of the senses to the point of being familiar with this expansion of musical sounds. Reaching that point, noise will still contain a certain power due to the tension of listening to what used to be dismissed as repulsive (cf. below on the abjective character of noise).

The history of noise – a brief sketch 2

The origin of music was in principle a process of purifying certain sounds by filtering out the irregular sounds, the noise. The church music of the Middle Ages was an extreme in this respect, allowing only the pure sound of the male voice and considering the interval of the third (today essentially consonant) a dissonance. The classical, Western tradition has (generally speaking) fostered instruments of pure sounds and maintained the exclusion of the impure, with some exceptions for dramatic effects (thunder, canons etc.). During the 19th century music became increasingly complex and dramatic, and at the same time the orchestra began to include more percussion instruments that were considered noisy. They were nevertheless far from what is today considered noise.
The first composer to consciously operate with noise as music was the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo, writing the manifesto “The Art of Noise” in 1913. He constructed the so-called “intonarumori” (noise intonators) and composed a few works for these machines. They were quite primitive, each instrument making a single sound when turning a handle, and the music still had a residue of the mimetic, illustrative function. But the idea of allowing all sounds to be music was a crucial turning point.

Edgar Varèse and John Cage both started from that point. For Varèse, the important thing was to expand the possibilities of music within the tradition of an autonomous artwork, i.e. including new sounds, formerly rendered non-musical, now without their illustrative effect. He tried to emancipate noise from its mimetic function, abstracting it as purely aesthetic in works like Ionisation (1931), where he used sirens because of their glissando-possibilities rather than alluding to an emergency. By shifting the focus from the notes to the sound, by seeing music as layered, organized sound rather than melodic-harmonic development and by experimenting with electronic instruments, Varèse is the probably most important pioneer of electronic music.
John Cage had similar visions, developing from an expansion of musical sounds in his invention of the prepared piano to the postwar philosophy that all music is just sound, and hence that all sound is music. He wanted to open our ears to all the sounds that surround us, emancipating all noises. This vision is still a long way from fulfillment.

After the Second World War musique concrète evolved in France, using tape technology to make music of found sounds. Pioneers were Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Pure electronic music was made possible by the mid-fifties, centered around the Cologne studio with composers like Gottfried Michael König, Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti. The inclusion of electronic noise and a distinction between various noise qualities was an integral part of this period. Since then, numerous composers have worked with acoustic as well as electronic noise.

Rock music and guitar noise

Noise in rock music is centered on two effects, both connected to the electric guitar and developed in the sixties: feedback and distortion. Feedback is the back-coupling of the sound when the small pick-ups on the guitar react to the sound from the amplifier, i.e. the sound they themselves transmit. Distortion is the fraying of the guitar sound originally produced by amplifier overload, now normally by pedals.

The deliberate use of these effects can be traced back to Link Wray’s “Rumble” (1958), but it was garage bands like The Kingsmen, The Kinks and especially The Who, who made it an integral part of their sound. The great innovator, however, was undoubtedly Jimi Hendrix, who constructed a whole catalogue of noise effects, using them with virtuosity in his blues-inspired rock compositions.

Aesthetically, however, the influence on noise rock came not from Hendrix, but rather The Velvet Underground, with their minimal, lo-fi, sinister music and disillusioned texts. On tracks like “European Son” and “Sister Ray,” the noise is alarming in ways that has made Velvet Underground a reference point for all noise rock.

In the 70s The Stooges continued the noisy garage tradition, combining it with free jazz elements, and paving the way for the punk rock movement. Lou Reed made his outstanding concept album Metal Machine Music (1975) – four vinyl sides of sheer guitar noise and nothing else, made partly as a provocation directed at the record company, the record has gained a reputation as a place for weird, noisy beauty. I will also mention Pere Ubu’s legendary first single “30 Seconds Over Tokyo” (1975), one of the most disturbing pieces of rock music ever made, and the provocative Throbbing Gristle debut 2nd Annual Report (1977).

The term “noise rock” (in Danish: støjrock) denotes a part of the post-punk scene rising from the ashes of punk in the late 70s. The use of guitar noise becomes a characteristic feature for a lot of bands, exploring its possibilities further. Post-punk is characterized by a certain preoccupation with the sinister, melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion – in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has called “the heterogeneous”. This term denotes that which does not fit into the normal and rational in modern society, that which cannot be subjugated by the public utility or profit. Post-punk thus tries to distance itself from the smoothness and cheerfulness of pop, though mostly without discarding its melodic qualities.

One of the important ways to achieve this is by using noise. Noise rock is not a coherent style, but a loose term for quite different approaches to a noise aesthetic within a post-punk idiom. It began in New York under the label of “No Wave” in the late 70’s and in Germany with Einstürzende Neubauten and other bands centered around “Die Geniale Dilletanten” around 1980. In the UK, actual noise rock did not emerge before 1985, when The Jesus & Mary Chain created the British, more melodic, variant.

It is not within the limits of this essay to give an overview of the noise rock and electronica scene and all its different sub-categories, but I will mention some of the most influential styles and names: Sonic Youth took off from guitar composer Glenn Branca to create their very own harmonic style and guitar techniques (see example below). Bands like Swans and Big Black used noise as a dark, hellish force in their aggressive, Gothic tales. Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. and others bridged the gap between post-punk and the impending grunge scene with their straightforward use of noisy guitars. My Bloody Valentine (see example below), A.R. Kane, Lush, Ride and many other British bands used guitar noise to create a more poetic, dreamy atmosphere, labeled ‘dreampop’ or “shoegazer”. Band of Susans made a minimal, mantra-like use of guitar noise with a British equivalent in bands Loop and Spacemen 3. Young Gods and Ministry, among others, used the sampler as a noise generator. In Japan, a noise scene grew out of the 70’s free jazz environment of Tokyo, featuring Keiji Haino, High Rise, The Boredoms, Merzbow and others.

By 1991 the development of guitar noise seemed to come to an end, culminating with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless as a worthy climax. Guitar noise had gone mainstream with blockbusters like Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins, and the sound possibilities seemed permanently exhausted. The place for noise exploration was no longer to be found on the rock scene but rather in electronic music.

Electronica uses noise in many different ways, sometimes so integrated that any distinction between noise and music is heavily blurred. Samples, drumloops, fast breakbeats, dub bass and of course all sorts of computer-generated sounds can be more or less noisy. An important trend is “glitch”, where errors are inflicted on CDs causing it to skip and get stuck. Oval is probably the most convincing glitch-artist, creating a blurred atmosphere not unlike that of My Bloody Valentine. Only few electronic artists, such as Merzbow (see below), deal exclusively with noise.

Four music examples

Sonic Youth

Sonic Youth made their debut at the so-called Noise Festival in New York, 1981, an event that marked the end of No Wave and the beginning of something new. With guitar composer Glenn Branca as their father figure, they set out to ‘reinvent the guitar’, considering the guitar a far richer instrument than normally acknowledged, containing a wide range of possibilities.

The guitar can be used as a percussion instrument, beating the strings with a broken drumstick, a screwdriver, or what-ever is at hand. Combining this effect with feedback, Sonic Youth created a bell-like, pealing sound. Every possibility of the instrument - the guitar, the pick-ups, the amplifier, even the electric plugs - were explored, and, as their most original characteristic, the strings were tuned differently, creating a new, more dissonant (sometimes even microtonal) harmonics, far from the general rock idiom. Sonic Youth developed an arsenal of more than 40 guitars each with its own tuning; often the two guitarists play with each their tuning at the same time.

A characteristic trait is what I shall call “the maelstrom of noise,” in which the tune and rhythm break off into a whirl of noise, gradually intensifying tempo and volume, absorbing the listener into its ecstatic black hole. This chaotic vortex is in opposition to the structural, formal elements of music, exceeding the boundaries of the senses, although still controlled on a higher level. The maelstrom is at the same time an explosion of energy and an implosion of meaning, turning away from the distinct and semantic into the sublime and ecstatic.

The common effect of noise in music is the aggressive, raging expression also found in the maelstrom of Sonic Youth. Noise is a vehement means, reflecting inner and outer chaos and conflict. But, as the next example will show, noise can also be used to evoke a very different experience.

My Bloody Valentine

My Bloody Valentine also had the ambition of reinventing the guitar, albeit with entirely different means and effects than Sonic Youth. In their music, noise is not aggressive, but low-key. Noise becomes introvert, dreamy, almost languidly erotic. This especially goes for the album Loveless and the related ep’s Glider and Tremolo.

Listening to My Bloody Valentine one encounters a diffuse blurred harmonics. The guitar chords are gliding, swimming in a muddy sea of distortion. The guitarists’ strokes are cut off in the mixing process, so that every sound seems to be growing out of nowhere, with no distinct edges. My Bloody Valentine extract all kinds of sound from the guitar, manipulating it in different ways, also by means of the sampler, so that, for instance, feedback can be transformed into a whistling, melodic instrument. The vocals are placed in the background of the sound stage on the same level as the other sounds, making the words almost undecipherable. The noise on Loveless is extraordinarily integrated in the music, not as a distinct layer of sound and not placed in opposition to an otherwise structural clarity.

All these effects put together with the sleepy motion and sweet, dreamy tunes, form an unreal, disorienting sound picture, “the-not-quite-really-there-sound”, as they themselves have called it. The dense sound makes no illusion of an acoustic space. It is claustrophobic; almost like being in an infinitely intimate place. There, the music affects you like the most coveted, yet vulnerable, states: tenderness, love, sex. You have to get very close, to immerse yourself in the web of noises to be able to let the vocals whisper sweet words in your ear. The blurriness of My Bloody Valentine’s sound is like the blurriness of getting so close to an object that you lose the outlines of it. And this object is as soft as a tender body.

But the disorientation takes the experience even further than a concrete sexual encounter, towards a more abstract, impersonal intimateness. There is not really an I-you-relation (as in a normal pop song), there is no room for such a distance; the intimacy is overwhelming, ambivalent and transgressive of any subjectivity, suggesting something akin to an incestuous, narcissistic or pre-oedipal relation.

My Bloody Valentine has made a new psychedelia without turning to the effects of the old; a psychedelia of noise. At their live concerts the band experimented with ending the performance with a sustained dose of sheer noise. They developed this stunt to perfection, culminating on the Loveless tour 1992, where a piercing, dazzling white light was thrown out into the faces of the audience while the pure noise took on new dimensions in volume and lasted for more than 15 minutes. This was a stark contrast to the soft, colorful preceding concert and provoked two different reactions: half of the audience left in protest or aural pain, while the other half stayed to find out what this would bring. And the experiences were very special. People underwent different ecstatic states, all pertaining to the trans-individual or pre-subjective: out-of-body-experiences, nirvana-like states, visions of being swallowed up by a giant vagina; and my own: hearing phantom lullabies that I’ve never heard before – very detailed and continuing to play in my head when I got home in bed. These experiences are not only an effect of an overload of the nervous system but are also inextricably tied up to the preceding concert, opening the mind towards the most intimate feelings.

Merzbow

Under the name of Merzbow, Tokyo based Masami Akita has produced pure noise music since 1979, and especially in the 90’s he has released a staggering number of electronically based releases, culminating in the 50 CD (+ artwork and CD-ROM) set Merzbox, a giant compilation of his finest work. Not only very productive, but also very consistent, he is constantly operating close to the limit of what can meaningfully be called music. Starting from Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, considered by many a terminal point for music, he exploits the varieties of noise without supplying it with any melodic material. Merzbow’s music is an ear-splitting assault on the body, at least, that is, until the nervous system is allowed to gradually relax from the state of alarm and enter the world of sensing extreme noise as music.

The name Merzbow is derived from Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau (aka Cathedral of Erotic Misery), a work in progress built by the use of found garbage material. If noise is the trash of music, the sounds that we traditionally discard as non-musical, then Merzbow is a trash artist, tirelessly seeking odd and convulsive beauty in the garbage cans of sonic waste. And, like Schwitters, Merzbow’s art is essentially urban, reacting to the overload of sensuous impressions in the big city. As a sort of apotropaic3 shield he throws the noise of Tokyo back into our ears, transforming it into an aesthetic experience.
No specific phenomena are recognizable, though. The Merzbow noise is abstract, minimal, deprived of mimetic content. Its effect is immediate, an overload of the nervous system, not being able to sort out the information into categories of relevant and irrelevant – hence the normal reaction of fear and discomfort when confronted with Merzbow noise. “Noise is the unconsciousness of music”, Merzbow states, in the same way as his other main interest, pornography and
bondage, is the unconsciousness of sex.

Merzbow noise is linked with fear, conflict and aggression as in rock music, but defying any melodies, the pure noise does not incite the listener to ecstatic bliss, but remains hard and somewhat conceptual to most of its audience.4

Curd Duca: Touch

Curd Duca’s “Touch” (1999)5 is a recent example of communicative noise, continuing a tradition of cut-up vocals that can be traced back to Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956). A female voice sings a line with a keyboard in the background, but we never hear it as a line, it sounds like the CD is damaged, causing it to stutter for a while and then jump to another stutter. The message is disturbed, almost indecipherable. The word “touch” is clear, though, several times manifest in its full length followed by a few notes before it collapses into the ongoing fragmentation. It is almost like a cubistic painting, a fractured view seeing things from different angles, constantly shifting its focus.

The music of this radical sample collage is beautiful. The vocal is gentle and sensually affectionate, singing the few notes of the sample in a longing way, as if reaching out to touch someone. Actually, after a reconstruction, the words seem to be “you’d be like heaven to touch”. This message, this gesture, is too disturbed to be communicated. The disturbance is, of course, not really a device error, but it hints at the familiar sound of a CD player not being able to read the digital information on the disc.

A work like this could be seen as a reflection of a cultural situation in which clear communication is disturbed and direct exchange of affections is threatened. The undamaged sample would risk being too sentimental, too pathetic to survive as more than a cliché in a postmodern world of information overload. Cutting it into pieces and transforming its banal statement into a more disturbing beauty actually makes it more authentic by virtue of alienation.

In this piece, noise is not a certain acoustic quality, as in the other examples, but a distortion of the message and of the melody by use of malfunction-like effects

Towards an aesthetics of noise

In various ways, noise as a sensual, aesthetic phenomenon points out of the field of the subject as a divided entity, towards what could be called the transsubjective, that which transgresses the individual. This applies to the explosive ecstasy as well as the implosive intimacy. This transsubjective point is also bridging the gap between rock music, normally considered subjective, and electronica, normally considered objective. With noise, rock turns away from its standard focus of a subject expressing his/her feelings, towards a more anonymous state. This was manifested on stage by My Bloody Valentine, having no focus on the band members, who appear only as shadows in front of a big screen with abstract psychedelic films projected on it. The following reflections on noise as Dionysian ecstasy and as abjectal intimacy points in this direction.

The Dionysian and the sublime

The ecstasy of noise is predominantly aggressive and vehement, as the maelstrom of noise in Sonic Youth. This is often an aesthetization of violence and suffering, the noise being an ingredient in what one might call a Dionysian aesthetic. In Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy) Friedrich Nietzsche described the Apollonian and the Dionysian as two principles of aesthetic attitudes toward suffering, working together in the Gesamtkunstwerk of Richard Wagner.

Apollo represents appearance, form, individuality, beauty and dream; the Apollonian aesthetics is an embellishment of suffering, a self-conscious lie, a veiling of
cruelty by use of form and elegance, a semblance of beauty. Dionysus, on the other hand, represents ecstasy, being, will, intoxication and unity; the Dionysian aesthetics is a direct confrontation with the terrible foundation of being, an absurd will driving us all in our meaningless lives. In the Dionysian ecstasy individuality is transgressed6 in favor of identification with the universal will - a frightening yet blissful experience. Frightening, that is, because it is a death-like giving up of the Ego, if only for a few seconds; blissful in letting go of the responsibilities of being a subject. The Dionysian experience is a “metaphysical comfort”, knowing that suffering is a necessary part of the effects of the eternal will – the destruction of things in order to create anew. In the Dionysian ecstasy one is no longer concerned with one’s individual suffering, seeing instead things from the universal point of view.

In music, the ecstasy of noise is undoubtedly a Dionysian effect, as opposed to the Apollonian melody and form.7 As mentioned above, the German words Rausch (ecstasy) and Geräusch (noise) are related, pointing towards this fact. The Dionysian is that which is not totally controlled or formed, e.g. screams and noises. The Apollonian elements are seductive, inciting the listener to enter the ecstatic bliss of the Dionysian, enabling the listener to dare the confrontation with the dreadfulness of existence. Therefore, Nietzsche says, the Dionysian needs the Apollonian.

Merzbow is so demanding exactly because he refuses this; he does not soften the harshness of noise with any Apollonian elements. Listening to Merzbow is thus a very different experience from the Sonic Youth maelstrom.

One of the reasons for the ecstatic effect of noise is its sublime character. The sublime is that which exceeds the limits of the senses, perceived as chaos or vastness. Despite our ability to put these words to it, the sublime goes beyond making sense - we never really understand it. The complexity of noise (in the acoustic sense) overloads the ears and the nervous system and is perceived as an amorphous mass, incomprehensible yet stirring. The delight of the sublime is the satisfaction of confronting the unfathomable.

Abject noise

As mentioned above, noises are the sounds that are discarded as being impure, unmusical. Music traditionally expurgates the dirty noise and fosters the pure tones. But noise belongs to the same pool of sounds from which music stems. Ideally, music is thus defining itself by a detachment from its origin. This is abjection, using the term coined by Julia Kristeva.

The abjects, in Kristeva’s sense, are the rejections from the body: stool, sperm, spittle, snot, nail clippings etc., considered dirty and repulsive. The reason why we are (more or less) repelled by the abject is that it threatens our individuality, being neither subject nor object, but something in-between, confusing our delimitation as individuals. The bodily cleansing process is a way of upholding one’s individuality, fearing the blur between the objective surroundings and ourselves. To confront ourselves with the abject is strongly ambivalent, a combination of pleasure and fear, reminding us at the same time of the pre-oedipal symbiosis with the mother and of death, the end of individuality.

Taking noise back, music confronts itself with its abject, plays with it, like a child playing with its stool, metaphorically speaking. This is perhaps a reason for the effects of My Bloody Valentine’s music, combining extreme intimacy and noise into something very sweet, but also implementing the fear of this (almost incestuous) closeness.

Noise as multiplicity

In his book Genèse the French philosopher Michel Serres develops an idea of the ultimate being-in-itself as noise. Behind the phenomenal world (the world we perceive) is an infinite complexity, an incomprehensible multitude, an analogue to white noise. All concepts, all understanding of the world is an ordering of this chaos,8 this multiplicity, “noise.” Serres uses the term “noise” with two meanings: the English (noise) and the old French word “noise,” meaning quarrel. He also hints at the Greek, maritime origin, “nausea” (see above). The multiplicity is conflict-ridden and noisy.

Noise and conflict are normally closely related in music as well. This aspect of noise is the reason why it is often used to express anger, fear and violence. Noise in music belongs, of course, to the phenomenal world, but exists at the limits of our senses, pointing metonymically towards a more fundamental noise, the chaos of the pre-phenomenal world. When we are confronted with a massive dose of noise, we often create our own sounds in our heads, “phantomic sounds”, as a desperate way of relating to the audible chaos.

There is also, I think, a more sociological perspective to this. In today’s society it is impossible to take in all the information that surrounds us; we are constantly forced to sort out loads of information to be able to find (hear) the desired or relevant information. Information society is verging on noise society, a state in which the information, meant to convey knowledge, ends up losing the ability to speak at all. Our culture becomes taciturn without being silent, moving towards a noisy muteness.

So what?

I have often been asked whether noise is subversive. I tend towards the answer “no, not directly, but it has a critical potential.” If subversion is what punk imagined itself to be, a riot that shocks bourgeois culture, I do not see any such possibilities in music. It might even be questioned whether punk really had that kind of effect. In the present historical situation, youth culture riots are verging on kitsch. There are a lot of reasons for this, the most visible being that rebel youth has become a lifestyle segment in commercial marketing.

Noise does not have a fixed, aesthetic meaning. Its phenomenological character depends on the musical as well as institutional context in which it is integrated. As we have seen above, noise is for instance not always aggressive and loud. Still, there are some common features: noise tends to abandon subjectivity, individuality, rationality, homogeneity and control in favor of the objectively irrational, the pre- or non-subjective sublime, something unstable and complex. This is a marginal phenomenon and not a permanent realm for anyone to enter. Still, it has (or has had) the potential of being critical of smooth calculation, ascetic rationality and habitual life. Such a critique does not come automatically with noise, of course, but only when reflecting a historical situation and at the same time embodying what is culturally repressed.

this article first published on the web here

there is an entire mystique around noise. cage was interested in ridding music of intention- not in using noise constructively. his focus is contingency and to this end he carefully used notation as well as maps and diagrams in a very duchampian way as indexical signs. there is a total aversion to improvisation in cage who is among the most literal of composers. Improvisation is the an orphaned resource today - i used to slip into la trinite to listen to messiaen improvising and this great composer steeped in talas and nonmetric plainchant seemed to be playing composition sketches. Stockhausen culminates process pieces like plus-minus with intuitive music like “aus den sieben tagen” but as jerome kohl shows they are fantastically closely designed (http://www20.brinkster.com/improarchive/jk_7t.pdf)

folk instruments often don’t aim at high amplitudes and so don’t have the pressure chambers or string and bow tensions of their 19 c descendants- this means articulate stabilisations around intervals take second place to noticeable slides from noise to pitch, making folk instruments models of the phoneme in their reliance on consonant transitions.

acoustically the noise-pitch distinction is void- extreme upper partials hardly belong in the pitches when you transpose them down and time base manipulating uses dc pulses or square waves which are as totally non periodic as clicks to make pitches and glissandi - look at the famous transition in kontakte from tapping to pitch lines drawn in no more than the speed of pulses. with the granular synthesis of gabor and xenakis the pitch noise distinction totally sinks into oblivion.

daniel dennett talks about freedom as evitability- working out how to avoid something otherwise inevitable - notions of freedom as lack of determination would see spontaneously jinxing out into the oncoming lane of the highway as paradigmatically free. this spinozist ( and deleuzian btw) notion of freedom as comprehended necessity perhaps finds the composer playing fully notated music at the well tempered keyboard the freest of all.

Cardew and Christian Wolff both take up questions directly and pragmatically and try to fill and reshape the shadow of Adorno.

I remember when the great american philosopher Hilary Putnam became Maoist and rewrote his own highly technical analytic philosophy as an auto critique- a moment right off the pages of Bellow or Stoppard.

today the problems have shifted- Mao belongs in the history of religion , Marx is now most accurately accessed via Deleuze, the field is neocolonial rather than post imperial -Mbembe and Said replace Castro and Lenin and the enemy is identity and universality - the two weapons in Cardews armory. In this context Mantra looks radical- particulalrly in its mysticism- and Stockhausen joins Kafka, Bacon Artaud and van Gogh as a saint of the mineure while Cardew becomes as quaint as an Orthodox Freudian or a Christian Scientist. Christine Lucia is incubating a new kind of discussion of Cardew that may rescue him from the comic genre of spiteful Stockhausen disciples: Cardew’s polemic and the Neue Einfachkeit are sparks from the same furnace.

Nevertheless musical South Africa ought to read Cardew and this book ought to fly between indignant and enthusiastic readers for a long time. South Africa never had its Malcolm X or Franz Fanon or Leopold Senghor -the closest it came to Genet was Vyfster - and even Adorno remains a kind of mystery cult reserved for postgraduates. The musical right should read Cardew to learn how bankrupt its missionary and patronizing attitudes are and the musical left should read Cardew to be reminded that they are fighting an institutional form – a network with its own cronyism, admins, economy and forms of judgment - and not the dimwitted individuals that fly off its surface – for they too are the victims of their class.

this article first appeared in the weekender of 7 november 2009

Warrick Sony was born in South Africa in 1958.He first came to public attention in the early 1980’s in South Africa as the sole member of the Kalahari Surfers.

They released five albums of politically radical music with numerous South African session musicians. Many of the albums where released by Chris Cutler’s Recommended Records in London as they were too political and anti-apartheid for South Africa at the time. The musicians where credited only by first names in fear of the Apartheid police. The music was only available to South Africans as imports during the 1980’s.

Most of the music also included sound recordings of political speeches from apartheid years in South Africa. This material had been collected while he was working as a sound recording engineer for American and European media networks while covering political activity in South Africa during the Apartheid years.

He then toured Eastern Europe with session musicians mainly from Henry Cow. Sony not only had to get permission from Anti-Apartheid organizations to perform, but had to have his passport stamped on a special pull-out page so that he could remove it when he returned to South Africa, as it was illegal for South Africans to enter the former Eastern European countries.

He then went on to produce music for many artists for Sony, BMG, Recommended, M.E.L.T. 2000, African Dope, Microdot and Shifty records. He is also involved in numerous sound recordings for film and commercials. He has also held sound recording workshops with Brian Eno for post graduate students.

PSF: What was your early musical background before you were ever in a band? Who were some of your favorite artists when you were young?

W.S.: I am autodidact, totally self-taught. Started playing guitar at age of 12, learning chords from a guitar course in a weekly magazine. First song I could play was “Bad Moon Rising” by Creedence. I loved a South African band called “the Suck”- they destroyed a grand piano on stage and played a killer version of the Black Sabbath song “War Pigs”- (it was) my intro into social comment and music. My friend’s brother had a wah-wah pedal and played a Hendrix riff through it and totally blew my mind. Hendrix was my introduction to electronics– this changed my life. The Suck also played “21st Century Schizoid Man,” a King Crimson song which led me into the murky depths of Prog and ART music. The psychedelic side of the Beatles led me to the work of Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha and I started collecting Indian music from Roopanand Brothers; my favourite Indian record dealer was off Grey Street in Durban (at that time, Durban had the biggest Indian community outside of India in the world). I listened to South Indian Veena music and learned tabla from the Surat School.

PSF: Could you talk about your upbringing and how that influenced your work? Did you have any first hand experiences with apartheid that left an impression on you?

W.S.: I grew up in Cowies Hill, a suburb of Durban. Attended Westville High School but was frustrated with the conservative confines of Christian Nationalist education. I played bass guitar in various school groups, doing Who and Hendrix covers. Left school a year early to go and live in an Krishna Ashram in Desai Nagar near Tongaat. In 1976, he was drafted into the Apartheid army - tried to fail (the) medical by fasting for 30 days drinking only distilled water. Military authorities declared me 100% fit for duty however and I had a 2 year stretch to sit out. I protested that as a Hindu pacifist I couldn’t use a gun so they put me into Medical Services and then in the Band where I played the trombone and enjoyed some formal musical education. I was politicized by Punk in ‘77 and formed a punk band in the army called “Grim Reaper”. I heard of Steve Biko’s death on my birthday whilst standing guard in the vehicle park without a rifle.

PSF: Could talk about any bands you were in before the Surfers started?

W.S.: Very influenced by the Crass/Lee Perry/Pere Ubu /Max Romeo/Talking Heads/Pop Group/This Heat/Art Bears/DAF, etc.. Very influenced by Punk and new wave and Reggae whilst in the army 1976-78 after leaving went to Cape Town and played in various punk/art/new wave bands: Rude Dementals, Happy Ships, Under Two Flags, The Cortisones

PSF: The Kalahari Surfers is essentially you with who ever you can get or choose to play on your recordings?

W.S.: Kalahari Surfers began as a musical exploration between 3 friends of likewise musical and political interests. Working in Cape Town, during the early ’80’s, a number of compositions were realized using a variety of tape machines. We discovered that the best way to compose was to record all of our improvisations, then to revisit, edit, rework and rehearse.

Later, with access to a studio, the process became more refined but essentially the studio or the ability to record was the instrument of composition. I had a fascination and love of gadgets and technology so with the access to multi-track recorders, I was able to realize more of my art alone.

PSF: Describe your creative process- how do you come up with songs?

W.S.: I often come up with a song title or song title idea like “Let’s Build a Shack” which was an obscure allusion to a Swell Maps song called “Lets Build a Car.” I then South Africanize the idea and set it in the near future ala JG Ballard – so the scenario is: we’re running from the cities which have been burnt and rubbled during civil war , families heading for the country with the refrain ” Let’s Build a Shack.” This was also a turn around for whites who don’t have these skills and for whom this would be an alien way of living but is totally normal for many South Africans.

PSF: You started as a sound recording engineer for various international media networks in the 1980s covering political events in South Africa and anti Apartheid activities?

W.S.: I worked as a free-lance sound recordist after moving to Johannesburg in 1983. I could work hard for a few months on a drama or feature film and then plough the money into the studio and spend a few months doing my albums.

PSF: Did you consider the Surfers’ work to be explicitly anti-apartheid?

W.S.: Surfers were an expression of an average white middle class teen’s rage against the injustices of that system. Punk helped me realize that. That we had a right to express ourselves and that we had a duty. This was our reality. We were suffering in the army against our will.

PSF: What censorship did you come across during time under the Apartheid government?

W.S.: I teamed up with Lloyd Ross (of Shifty Records) towards the end of last year (2003). Lloyd made a documentary (for the new South African Broard Corporation under democracy) on James Phillips (musician who had passed away). While he was in the South African Broadcasting Corporation archive, he found records with gouge marks on them. Someone had the job of carefully dragging a nail across the offending track to make sure no-one would play it ( low tech censorship).

PSF: Did you ever have to leave South Africa to record because of censorship?

W.S.: Lloyd Ross had a mobile studio in an old Rand Mines house which we all lived. I went to Lesotho to help him record a group called Uhuru who (because of the reggae band) changed their name to Sankomoto and became, over the years, very successful. They were banned for political reasons from entering South Africa at that time, so the only way to record them was to take the studio there. At that time, we were sharing a house with Jaqui Quinn who was murdered in Lesotho during an operation to kill her husband who was in African National Congress ( the liberation party that fought the Apartheid Government) which was done a Vlakplaas (the Apartheid security police) hit squad directed by Eugene de Kock. Check out the Truth Commission report.

PSF: Your music has a lot of speech recordings of 1980’s political events. Did you collect these and then decide to put music to them?

W.S.: This was the environment we lived in. Later, as international interest peaked and Apartheid was in its last throes, more and more work came from the foreign media networks. I did hard news for CBS News, ABC News, WTN, BBC and ITN in an environment which was hostile to media workers. I was often suffering the same tear gas and police bullying as the protesters. I ran a cassette machine and collected audio whilst working. I still have piles of cassette tapes with all sorts of audio: Hitler Youth type school sports days, Afrikaaner right wingers singing hymns, rallies, marches, police announcements radio broadcasts as I was the collector of Apartheid’s audio garbage.

PSF: Could you talk about the use of humor and satire in your work?

W.S.: South Africans use humour to get out of and express all sorts of troublesome situations – Puns and word plays are part of black newspaper culture and a way of seeing. Living through the John Vorster and (prime minister) P.W. Botha era one couldn’t help laughing a loud at the antics of the State (nothing has changed I might add – check out the work of Zapiro in the Mail and Gaurdian newspaper now), I also found in the early work of the Mothers of Invention very inspiring – the cynical critique of American culture and its covert operations world wide, the jaundiced cynical eye of Frank Zappa always helped me to see South Africa in a certain way.

PSF: Since you use so many field recordings in your work, who were some of the artists who also used this medium that influence your work?

W.S.: Holgar Czukay’s album Movies, Eno & Byrne’s Bush of Ghosts, This Heat– both albums, Karlhenz Stockhausen.

PSF: Looking back now, what are your favorite Surfer albums?

W.S.: The albums fall into two distinct time period– those of the ’80’s which are word and concept albums and those of the post ‘94 freedom period, which are more film and music driven.

Pre ’90’s, I like the Bigger than Jesus album– the last of that lot of work which I think was lyrically the most accomplished. Of the post ‘94 stuff, the last album Panga Management, which was mostly done using Ableton Live, the first major new software I’ve adopted since Protools in the ’80’s.

PSF: Where can one listen or purchase any of your found sound recordings?

W.S.: Everything is a negotiation as have contributed my recordings to, South African artist, William Kentridges theatre production Ubu and the Truth Commission as well as the theatre production Truth in Transition. More recently, Sweetnoise, a metal band from Poland, made use of my work for their new album Tripty.

PSF: When apartheid ended, did you have to change focus musically?

W.S.: I didn’t ‘HAVE to’ as it was more a freedom as like now we can write about love and rivers and trees and shit without being insensitive. My musical freedom was to enjoy working with music without words.

My post-Apartheid work evokes atmospheres of ambiguous discomfort… sort of strange worlds of ethnic misfits. Music suited better to film.

PSF: What musicians toured with you?

W.S.: For the UK and European concerts, Recommended Records put together a band for me which consisted of:

Mick Hobbs (from Officer) on bass
Alig (from Family Fodder) on keyboards
Tim Hodgkinson (from Henry Cow) played keyboards and sax and slide guitar for the East Germany gigs
Chris Cutler on drums (Henry Cow, Art Bears, etc.)
Myself on guitar and vocals and tapes
Maggie Thomas did our sound

In South Africa, I worked with existing bands and we toured together as a two part act:

The Kerels played with me in Durban
The Cherry Faced Lurchers did many gigs for me
Louis Mahlanga and his Musiki Afrika played with Lesego & the Surfers

In France, at the festival of Angoulemem, Ubuyambo and Amampondo have also done gigs and tours with me. Ghetto Muffin was a Ragga outfit I played with in Norway.

PSF: In the 1980’s, you toured Eastern Europe. How did this come about?

W.S.: During the middle of February 1987, the Kalahari Surfers were asked to play at the 17th Festival of Political Song in East Berlin. “Rote Liede” was the title of that years effort and the line up included artists from all over the world. These were the times when politics were fashionable in Western popular music. It had been 10 years since punk, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev and P. W. Botha were in power and many songwriters worked social comment and political satire into their lyrics. In England left wing pop stars had formed a movement called the Red Wedge which include people like Billy Bragg and the Communards. Communist Chic was in.

I came from a country where a man had gone to prison for having an A.N.C. (liberation movement that fought the apartheid government) flag on his beer mug, where the state employed its Iron Fist against any form of criticism regularly banning and detaining activists and artists. My passport had to have a special removable page when I traveled to the East Bloc so that the South African authorities would not be tempted to enquire about my goings on behind the Iron Curtain.

Chris Cutler was well connected with the East Bloc and set it all up. He was brilliant at getting gigs. We played in East Germany and Soviet Union. I met political exiles in Moscow and in East Germany, people like Max Mfazwe who had fought for (Zimbabwe prime minister) Robert Mugabe and Umkonto (armed wing that fought apartheid) and was married to an East German girl. I later bumped into them in Johannesburg South Africa many years later having resettled in SA after liberation. Good people with interesting stories.

PSF: You toured Brazil also.Who did you play with there?

W.S.: Lesego Rampolokeng and I were invited to perform at a poetry festival in Belo Horizonte and we performed together with backing tracks. The new South Africa had just happened and I was of the opinion that The ANC (newly democratically-elected government in South Africa) ad agency Hunt Lascaris had done a great job on selling the flag, peace and a happy transition to the Nation, along with our great leaders. Indeed, it was heady optimistic times and I told Brazilian journalists the same. Lesego disagreed and said that they were all untrustworthy corrupt sellouts as I guess there was some truth in that.

PSF: You went to Chris Cutler’s Recommended records in the 1980s to record Own Affairs. Why didn’t you record and press it in South Africa?

W.S.: I recorded all my albums in South Africa. They were manufactured in the UK by Chris Cutler’s company because no-one in SA would do them. EMI made me pay for cutting the vinyl acetate of side one of my first album but told me to basically go away and don’t do that sort of thing as it was ‘political, anti-religious and pornographic,’ as they called it (your basic hit rap album now!)

PSF: You named your one album after Tim Hodgkinson’s song on a Henry Cow album?

W.S.: The album is called Living in the Heart of the Beast which Tim took from a book called In the Belly of the Beast (by Lyndall Hare) because that’s what living in S.A. felt like… the Beast.

PSF: You have done recording workshops with Brian Eno?

W.S.: He came to South Africa to do a series of interactive art workshops and basically connect with SA musicians and artists. I engineered the session at the Baxter in Cape Town (February 1998) where he composed with about 30 non musician artists a piece using various found sounds and instruments of great miscellany.

PSF: What soundtracks have you contributed to?

W.S.: Most notably the Truth Commission film of John Boormans called In My Country based on the book Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog.

PSF: What musical acts/groups have you toured with?

W.S.: We played with Fred Frith (from Henry Cow) band Keep the Dog in Russia and during the ’90’s, I had a band called TransSky (a pun on the homeland in Apartheid) and we toured with Massive Attack during their South African visit.

PSF: You used political speech recordings and incorporated them into songs. The song “Teargas” is interesting and great. How did that come about?

W.S.: I had recently played a concert for the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), during which the police rolled a canister of teargas into the hall creating pandemonium. That same evening, I laid down the vocal line for a track which featured a distorted voice shouting ‘Teargas! Tear gas’ over and over and coughing and choking. It was a performance piece in the studio. Tragic comic… that was South Africa in the ’80’s.

I was working then as a film sound recordist to pay off the 16 track tape recorder I had bought for the studio that I shared with Lloyd Ross. The state media machine was like a theatre of the absurd. I used bits of propaganda films in my music: P.W. Botha’s State of Emergency speech, news broadcasts and quiz programs. I’d intercut material that I’d recorded in the field as a documentary sound recordist for the BBC or Channel 4. William Burroughs was the guiding light in splice and paste word/content experiments and I’d devour anything thing that spoke to me in the ironic voice.

PSF: Touring Russia in the 1980’s must have been quite an eye opener for a South African?

W.S.: We played at Festâ- it was put together by the Committee of Youth Organizations,(KOMSOMOL) and was held at the Palace of Youth. Gorbachev was making massive reforms then. I never met a communist in Russia, even though I was staying in the Communist Youth League’s fanciest hotel. It made me feel strange, the distance between foreigners and locals. The haves and have-nots in the socialist dream. The place was awash with Americans. Perestroika and Glasnost were the buzz words. I could get three times the official rate on the black market, but money is worthless when there is nothing to buy.

Luckily I found Melodia (the only Soviet record company) made good vinyl so I stocked up on hundreds of fantastic classical records.

I was amazed at the extraordinary experiments (that) humanity has attempted. The break up of the Soviet Union was beginning… which was the exact opposite to what was happening in South Africa. We were trying to bring all the former homelands under one united South Africa- separate development of all the different races was a bad idea for us. I had many arguments with Russians over this. Here were a people moving toward democracy, away from Socialism, whereas we still had the overtures of Socialism, in fact, one could have died for being a communist in South Africa at that time. To be a rebellious youth in Russia, you’d become a Christian and wear a pendant with a picture of the last Czar aroundyour neck.

To be a rebellious youth in South Africa, you’d be anti-Christian and wear a lapel badge sporting a hammer and sickle. The Russians never got their democracy and we (South Africa) never got our socialism. Another one of God’s curved balls.

PSF: Your original title of one of your albums Bigger than Jesus was banned, and later released as Beach Bomb. Was this as a result of Christians telling everyone that rock music had hidden Satanic messages, or because of multi tracking and sampling?

W.S.: A piece I did called “Play it Backwards” as on my second album used voices from Radio Today (a morning news broadcast of the ’80’s), discussing the hidden messages in rock music, which are found by playing records backwards. I was intrigued, so I ordered the tape from a guy who made a living out of doing this stuff. He’d even written a book, assembling hundreds of examples of these ridiculous messages that he’d discovered by playing his record collection backwards! He later charged that these secret messages could be found on some of Shifty’s releases. We challenged him on this, and by using his same technique, I proved that even Christian songs had demonic undertones, when I demonstrated that the line “God is in all of our aims,” turned into “Satan is in all of our aims” when it was played backwards. He settled out of court.

PSF: Are there other South African bands now that you admire? Are there any that you feel are kindred spirits to you?

W.S.: I have always been intrigued by African computer programming in music – the beginnings of this with Chico’s work on the MC500 on Brenda Fasi’s albums to early Kwaito (songs like “Magents” by Senyaka ) and Arthurs’ Kaffir, right up to the Gabby Leroux’s work with Mandoza. I’m also still an avid listener of ’70’s mbaquanga music, especially now that it has been re released on CD, especially Moises Mchunu, Soul Brothers Abafana Basequdeni and the African Cheese stuff like Harari.

(I like) an experimental rock group called EMP (that) I used for a movie a few months ago- they are really brilliant in an instrumental style similar to what 65 Days Of Static are doing in the UK. Also Felix Leband, Waddy (Max Normal) , Tumi and The Volume, Real Estate Agents, Teba, Crosby, Zukile, MArekta, Mzi & Ginga, Lesego, Marcus Wormstorm- all are out there ploughing a new groove.

I liked Miriam (Makeba) when she was with the Skylarks during the Sophiatown period and Hugh (Masekela) when he was with his band “The Union of South Africa” and of course, he did write one of the best South African songs ever- “Stimela.” For Dollar (Brand), the album he did with Johnny Dyani was for me his greatest- Good News From Africa on the Enya label, a real gem. Sakhile first album was OK. Ladysmith (Black Mambazo) is the most imitated group in our history.

PSF: What do you think the prospects are for the political future of your country?

W.S.: This is an inspiring and amazing country, predictions of which will always surprise one. The present government has taken us down the road of many other African dictatorships, with its corruption and divide and rule personality cult… and that persons’ (South African President Thabo Mbeki) obsession with race, and his veiled Stalinism. He has removed his opposition, not terminally, but clinically and being an exile brought his, understandable, bitterness against whites to the countries leadership. The political spectrum in the ANC divides along the 3 lines: the exiles, the Islanders (those incarcerated on Robben Island like Nelson) and the UDF - those who fought apartheid from within the countries mass democratic movement. It is these latter that Mbeki purged and forced from office a la Joe Stalin.

There are many wonderful people waiting in the wings to lead us back to optimism and good will. With the demise of the Mbeki regime, I feel we will be a great country with abilities to solve our great problems peaceably.

this interview first published on furious.com