photo: cherry bomb
“it wasn’t that great for me
dissapointing
no sound check
battling with gear
and compromised performance
couldn’t hear cues or anything
hard environment
(dance/rock club)
these things work better in a quiet theatre type environ
with listening audience”
w.sony
GRANDMASTER
ONCE AGAIN YOU DIDN’T FAIL TO TORMENT ME WITH THESE RARE BLESSINGS. JUST AS I WAS LISTENING TO KALAHARI SURFERS END-BEGINNINGS, TRACK NO 8 (THE DESK) WITH THAT EVER CAPTIVATING WARRICK STYLE. IN THE SAME BREATH HAUNTED BY THE SOUNDS OF JOCELYN POOK ON THE SOUNDTRACK OF THE MOVIE EYES WIDE SHUT. AND ALSO HAVING THE STORIES OF THE TORMENTED & TORMENTING MASTERPIECES OF CLASSICAL GENIUS ELIZABETH SCHUMANN. AND OF Course VOICES OF DON CHERRY, JON TCHICAI , ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO AND OF COURSE MADNESS OF JOHnNY DYANI .. , I FOUND WHAT YOU SENT ME (WARRICK & LABAND LIVE AT INDEPENDENT ARMCHAIR) TO BE ONE OF THE MOST SCHIRZOPHRENISING PIECEs OF SOUND TO LISTEN TO . SOMETHING BETWEEN INDUSTRIAL GARBAGE & RELIGIOUS EXORCISM, A SOUND SO DISTURBING & ANNOYING TO LISTEN TO YET HAUNTING & ADDICTIVE AT THE SAME TIME.
I THINK THIS IS MUSIC OF THE FUTURE, WARRICK & LABAND ARE 150 YEARS AHEAD OF TIME, IT’S A RARE FIND INDEED.
“Collaboration” is such a romantic word on a music flyer. It invites the audience to a privileged once-off experience to partake in the making of musical history. It reveals the behind-the-scenes nuts-and-bolts of music creation between two personae-stripped musicians. It elevates the humble music gig to an act of subversive performance art.
Billed to start with a movie showing, followed by collaborations between four moody, enigmatic and disparate musicians each with their own cult following, the Felix Laband, Warrick Sony, Righard Kapp and Aryan Kaganof gig at the Armchair Theatre promised all of the elements of an Eighties anarchist meeting. AND it was on a Sunday night as though no one who would be interested was even mildly affiliated to the corporate world.
Except Felix Laband and except that there appeared to be too many nuts and bolts on show with no musical suspension of disbelief. See, the perennially persuasive heroine-drop beats of Felix Laband pulled the wrong crowd. Cape Town trendies suffered their way through Kaganof’s documentary Unyazi of the Bushveld, talked their way through Kapp and Kaganof’s gig, and, finally, after Laband and Sony’s first track, gave up on their dream of a candy flipping dance floor. Most of them cleared off to Stones at this point (Kaganof could have been proud).
A handful stayed and were sporadically intrigued by what Laband was pulling out, allegedly. According to organizer Rosemary Lombard, it was in fact Sony’s sounds that pulled the admiration and Laband was just strumming his bass guitar. I couldn’t really tell. Truth be told, besides the Unyazi of the Bushveld showing, I struggled to dedicate any more than moments of the concentration to the performances.
The music just didn’t seem to filter through the general clatter of a distracted fidgety audience. Maybe in a different environment, the fragments I picked up would form a greater whole, but clearly that whole wasn’t arresting anyone on the evening. I do remember enjoying momentous bits on Kapp’s guitar and finding Kaganof’s voice a gravelly cross between William Burroughs and Trent Reznor. I remember wanting Kaganof to do more poems and being super intrigued by the accompanying visuals – which I found out afterwards was Chelsea Girls by Andy Warhol.
Kaganof also revealed post-gig that it was a memorial for German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. I had to Google Karlheinz. He sounds like quite an interesting dude with his controversial electronic compositions for symphony orchestras. One review admitted that his admiration was not unanimous and that “British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, who founded the London Symphony Orchestra, was famously quoted as answering a question as to whether he had ever conducted any Stockhausen by saying: ‘No, but I believe I once trod in some.’”
This reminded me of the interview with Matthew Ostrowski in Unyazi of the Bushveld, when he said something along the lines of… just because an electronic musician is pushing the boundaries of his instruments and the plasticity of his medium, doesn’t mean he’s making anything either musical or significant. This was my general feeling about the Warrick Sony and Felix Laband collaboration – not that I had trod in it, but that it didn’t seem to amount to anything.
Apparently they hadn’t practiced are jammed together before the gig at all, which brings me full circle back to the allure of “collaboration”. While “practice” does remove the allure of the occidental in “collaboration”, it does seem prudent to at least check that you gel before performing. As an intellectual exercise in the raw nuts and bolts of music before being shined up for consumption, the performance could be deemed interesting. However, I think everyone would have preferred to be sublimated to a state of musical awe. That said, Kaganof and Kapp did apparently practice and click, but didn’t manage to translate this on stage.
Unfortunately I am not a musician, so pontificating on what the ideal elements and levels of commitment that collaboration requires can not be revealing in any manner. However, I would love a musician to give me some insights on how it does and can work…
Still, I would go to the gig again and many more like it for giving me that exclusive experience and offering me sound that is not replicable, placating or dismissible.
“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
Embracing dissonance
At the Independent Armchair Theatre on December 9
Don’t be fooled by its ironic billing. Pop Shield: An Evening of Improvised Experimental Music and Film by Some Umlungus is not just another underground sales pitch selling improvisation as an excuse for a self-indulgent jam session. Not if the umlungus in question happen to be an all-star cast of collaborators, including electronica poster boy Felix Laband, legendary dub surgeon Kalahari Surfer Warrick Sony, the Buckfever Underground’s abstract guitar adventurer Righard Kapp and prolific author, filmmaker and cultural provocateur Aryan Kaganof — that’s for sure.
felix laband
The evening begins with the Cape Town premiere of Aryan Kaganof’s experimental 45-minute documentary Unyazi of the Bushveld (2007), which documents Africa’s first international festival of electronic music held in Jo’burg in 2005. Thereafter Kapp sculpts an improvised soundtrack for Kaganof’s set of accompanying spoken-word poetry based on feedback sourced from electric and acoustic guitar and a no-input mixing desk, as well as other peripheral guitar sounds. Finally, the pick of the Pop Shield pack teams Kapp with Sony and Laband for what the press release describes as “a loosely structured, improvised sonic tableau, involving esoteric, mostly locally derived samples, fractured, dubby moodscapes and prepared song forms attempting to convey a sense of the hardwired dread and cognitive dissonances embedded in the contemporary South African psyche”.
righard kapp
Hang on. How are you supposed to dance to such dissonance? Well, that’s precisely the point of staging such an event. Rather than serve up an easily digestible “pop” entertainment package of “phat” electro beat sedatives or colour-by-number indie-rock sales pitches for punters to passively party to, Pop Shield prompts audiences to engage with actively and make sense of the experimental improvisations emanating from the stage. “Improvisation is about broadening my musical vocabulary, acknowledging the beauty in contingency and accident — and by implication foregrounding the physical and textural over the cerebral, that which the mind has mulled over,” explains Kapp. “[But] I hesitate to call myself an improviser, as I cultivate playing habits. I prefer to say I compose with elements beyond my control.” The gig starts at 8pm. Admission is R40. — Miles Keylock
this article first appeared here
don’t miss it
independent armchair theatre
lower main road, observatory
cape town
starts 8pm
“Kaganof’s film successfully unearths the efforts and diverse motivations of a subversive group of musicians who, as local muso Warrick Sony suggests, refuse to censor their expression to comply with the musical tastes of the masses.”
- Mary Corrigall, Sunday Independent, 8 July 2007.
An improvised performance of poetry set to music by Kaganof and Righard Kapp will follow. Thereafter Felix Laband and Warrick Sony will perform together for the first time ever.
DJ Chairman Miao (Cherry Bomb/Rose Lombard) will end the evening with a mix of vintage African rock ‘n’ roll.
The event grew organically out of filmmaker Aryan Kaganof’s request to Rosemary Lombard to organise a Cape Town screening for “Unyazi of the Bushveld” (45 min, 2007), his experimental documentary of Unyazi 2005, Africa’s first international electronic music symposium, an event which was conceived and organised by Dimitri Voudouris, and held at Wits University, Johannesburg in September 2005. Rosemary saw the Cape Town premiere of Unyazi of the Bushveld as an opportunity to facilitate a live collaborative performance by some of this city’s established electronic sound innovators, in context with the spirit of experimentation and exchange espoused at the original symposium.
After the unyazi film screening at 8.30, the live performance will commence with abstract guitarist Righard Kapp, possibly most familiar to audiences from his work with the Buckfever Underground, accompanying spoken word poetry by Kaganof. Thereafter, Kapp will be joined by prolific music producer and sound collector Warrick Sony (aka Kalahari Surfers) and electronica superstar Felix Laband for a loosely structured, improvised sonic tableau, involving esoteric, mostly locally-derived samples, fractured dubby moodscapes and prepared songforms attempting to convey a sense of the hardwired dread and cognitive dissonances embedded in the contemporary South African psyche.
unyazi of the bushveld features performances by zim ngqawana, pops mohamed, michael blake, pauline oliveros, james webb, george lewis and many others. sound design is by joel assaizky and the film was produced by the african noise foundation.
A series of concerts and festival around the POW Ensemble
POW Ensemble plays its two major programmes: a loud speaker performance “Speaking of the Speaker”, and the new programme with songs “Homage to Hazard”. More special projects are led by DNA, Guy Harries and Tom Tlalim. A musical meeting, in collaboration with STEIM, will take place between three virtuoso trombone players who make use of live electronics, each in very different ways. The series is closed by an extraordinary confrontation between Jacob van Eyck’s 17th century music and modern electric guitar.
The festival weekend (24-25 Nov) is marked by extraordinary performances, concerts, films and lectures, highlighting specific aspects of 21st century music. Short lectures/demonstrations are given by grand masters like graphic designer/video artist Jaap Drupsteen, musician/theater maker Peter Zegveld, Circuit Bender Gijs Gieskes and sound artist Horst Rickels.
A special version of John Cage’s Cartridge Music is performed, being the result of a series of workshops at the Koorenhuis by students under direction of DNA. And a rarely shown documentary by Aryan Kaganof, about the very first festival on electronic music in Africa: Unyazi of the Bushveld (2007).
Dates: November 24/25 (weekend festival),
Unyazi of the Bushveld
In september 2005 vond in Johannesburg voor de allereerste keer een festival voor elektronische muziek plaats. Belangrijke musici en componisten als Pauline Oliveros, Lukas Ligeti, George Lewis, Yannis Keriakides en Francisco Lopez traden op, naast Afrikanen als Zim Ngqwana, Louis Moholo, The Kalahari Surfer en de legendarische Egyptische componist Halim El-Dabh. Ook het POW Ensemble was van de partij met een speciale SA edition.
Filmer Aryan Kaganof, in Nederland bekender onder de naam Ian Kerkhof (Naar de Klote!) maakte een zeer originele documentaire over het Unyazi Festival, waarin beelden en de muziek van verschillende optredens worden gemixt tot een nieuw geheel.
this announcement first appeared on the website of donemus
from Zig Zag surf magazine early 80’s
first Kalahari Surfers press interview ever
after the release of “Burmimg Tractors Keep Us Warm”
