When I interview Aryan Kaganof, I try my best to avoid mentioning that the first time I saw him perform he was naked, suspended from a rope, hanging upside down from the ceiling.
Known for pushing the boundaries as a filmmaker, director, poet, novelist, musician and blogger, Kaganof is thankfully not intimidating at all in person. Although he does suggest that we both stay quiet and rather telepathise the interview in a mind battle.
Kaganof is the architect behind a collaboration that brings together a collection of mind-bending artists in the upcoming Badilisha Poetry X-Change on November 27 and 28 at the Spier Estate. In Kiswahili, “Badilisha” is an expression denoting change, exchange and transformation.
The festival is curated by poet Malika Ndlovu and arts manager Lorelle Viegi.
“Noise,” he explains, ” is a sign of our culture. It’s everything that people in charge want you not to hear and not to see.” Together the collective hopes to create a space of “healing alchemy”. He says that in putting this piece together, he feels “the second most excited since having a baby”.
Ngqawana, despite being highly revered in the music community, is scarcely seen performing in Cape Town.
“This country has a terrible history of neglecting its great jazz artists while they’re still alive,” says Kaganof. “And I think it’s insane that Zim isn’t playing constantly.”
Describing the musician as a “compositional genius and an improviser” he adds: “It’s a dream come true to put people like Zim and Warrick together because they’ve never worked together before.”
He tells me this story: “I first saw Warrick in Cape Town in 1978 at a club called Scratch (named after Lee “Scratch” Perry) that was one of the few non-racial clubs in the country. I was 15 at the time and he was playing in this band called The Happy Ships.”
Kaganof claims to have seen Sony playing the “scissors” and continues: “My whole aim was bringing him back to those kinds of acoustic instruments.”
Kaganof talks about non-racial clubs during the ’80s as a group of political partygoers all “dancing their way to freedom”.
“I’m still trying to dance my way to freedom,” he confesses.
About the project at the festival, he says: “We don’t want to set limits, everyone is coming in with absolute openness.” This is Kaganof’s way of bringing these hugely diverse artists together, in producing something that could possibly never be seen again.
The African Noise Foundation was originally started in 1999. “It is an umbrella and in that umbrella the personnel can always shift and change, but it’s a way of putting people together in ways that don’t fit within a genre. Putting these artists together was too important not to do.”
The build-up to Badilisha will include a series of workshops from November 24-26 at various venues in the city. Kaganof will present Lost For Words: Working in Collectives, which will aim to deconstruct poetic conventions and discuss language exhausted of meaning. The festival includes international performers Dorothea Smartt (UK), Warsan Shire (Somalia) and Ngoma Hill (US).
# Check out the Badilisha Poetry X-change on November 27 and 28 at the Spier Estate. Time: 7.30pm. Tel: 021 422 0468. Info: www.badilishapoetry.com
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.
Godfather of local electronica, Warrick Sony aka The Kalahari Surfers, needs no introduction. Following his musical rebirth in 2000 Sony has gifted us his epiphanic masterpiece ‘Akasic Record’ (2000), all mystery and dreamy elegance, followed by the more upbeat, bass-driven ‘Muti media’ (2003) and the excellent ‘Panga management’ (2007); this in addition to 2003’s trance outing through Microdot Records, ‘Conspiracy of Silence’.
While all this was going on, a great, unreleased collaboration was coming to life in the shadows. Sony gives us a peek into the makings of what sounds to be a magnificent beast. As he put it: “ex-ORB Greg Hunter and Kris Weston vs. me and Brendan Jury. Unlimited budget and never finished – began in 1998 and a version finished now. 2 continents, self-flagellation, yoga and the beach!”
Warrick’s low-down: “[MELT2000’s Robert Trunz] suggested a collaboration [between Trans.Sky, comprising Warrick Sony and Brendan Jury, and] his favourite producer Greg Hunter, who at that point was finishing off his ‘Alien Soap Opera’ project and decided to swop freezing London for a particularly fantastic Cape Town summer.
‘Turntabla’ began in the summer of 1998 at what was then Shifty Studios in Camp Street, Cape Town. Greg fell in love with a Berimbau I bought when I was in Brazil, and worked on it day and night until he was shitfuckn hot on it. Brendan did string stuff on his viola and processed viola. We were jamming with piano, tabla, viola, veena, berimbau, mridangam, turntables, udu pots.. We even went out and bought and old Wurlitzer church organ for the bass pedals – I’ve never had so much fun in a recording. I think we all did.”
Following the initial swell of inspiration the project was dormant for two years, with Hunter and Weston back in the UK and other key conspirator Brendan Jury moving to Joburg. “Greg returned in 2000 and we finished the album at Milestone [studios], blowing all their main studio speakers in the process. This was a very productive period and the album shifted from the very synthesized sound to more organic; Greg taking control and shaping performances from myself, Madala Kunene, and a string quartet for 2 of the tracks.”
“The album lay around for a decade until Robert Trunz asked me if I wouldn’t mind doing some of my own mixes - a sort of remix of an album that never was. I returned to the album, found amazing performances [to replace some uncleared samples] that we’d done ourselves, and some great Madala Kunene guitar.. and so I reworked 3 quarters of the album.”
With Greg Hunter and Warrick Sony as inter-successive heads of this decade-spun project, and all the heady, exotic ingredients in the mix, I can’t wait to wrap my ears around this one!
On May1 I finished reading a thriller called ” Wolves Eat Dogs ” by Martin Cruz Smith
Set in Chernobyl 20 years after the the worst nuclear accident in history. I was spellbound by the descriptions of the ghost town and the JG Ballard like landscape…it is science fiction become fact. Three years after the accident
I visited and played gigs in the former Soviet Union never really being aware of how massive the impact that disaster had been then. The novel inspired me to find out more about this and what it means to us now. So many of the issues of the 80’s are reappearing today like bounced cheques. I thought May Day particularly auspicious to put this together because it happened just before and good Soviets were busy preparing for the big day.
I stumbled upon this website /blog by a woman who calls herself Filatova Elena Vladimirovnaa -
She is in love with a Kawasaki big ninja, ZZR-1100 (ZX-11) and rides it through radioactive countryside and villages like Pripyat the city 3 kms from Chernobyl which was evacuated.
She also takes photos and writes a journal.
“My favourite are roads that haven’t been ridden for years. Sometimes, I leave a log on the road to see if someone else will travel here. When I return in a year or two, seeing my log has not been moved suggests that I still have no followers.”
Her passion (apart from the bike )is the Chernobyl disaster and she has collected just about every bit of info about the event that exists
the main page to her site is here:
http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/highres/highres.html
her photo journey through Chernobyl and surrounding villages is here http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/chapter1.html
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the story of Chernobyl Reactor 4 (the worlds biggest nuclear power station -5 & 6 were still in being built ) : as told by Elena:
On the Friday evening of April 25, 1986, the reactor crew at Chernobyl-4, prepared to run a test the next day to see how long the turbines would keep spinning and producing power if the electrical power supply went off line. This was a dangerous test, but it had been done before. As a part of the preparation, they disabled some critical control systems - including the automatic shutdown safety mechanisms.
Shortly after 1:00 AM on April 26, the flow of coolant water dropped and the power began to increase.
At 1:23 AM, the operator moved to shut down the reactor in its low power mode and a domino effect of previous errors caused an sharp power surge, triggering a tremendous steam explosion which blew the 1000 ton cap on the nuclear containment vessel and rised it in the air.
Some of the 211 control rods melted and then a second explosion, whose cause is still the subject of disagreement among experts, threw out fragments of the burning radioactive fuel core and allowed air to rush in - igniting several tons of graphite insulating blocks.
Once graphite starts to burn, its almost impossible to extinguish. It took 9 days and 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite, clay and lead dropped from helicopters to put it out. The radiation was so intense that many of those brave pilots died.
It was this graphite fire that released most of the radiation into the atmosphere and troubling spikes in atmospheric radiation were measured as far as thousands of miles away.
These were inexcusable errors of design.
The causes of the accident are described as a fateful combination of human error and imperfect technology. Andrei Sakharov said, that Chernobyl accident demonstrates that our system cannot manage modern technology.
In keeping with a long tradition of Soviet justice, they imprisoned several people who worked on that shift - regardless of their guilt. 25 from the shift died.
Radiation will stay in the Chernobyl area for tens thousand years, but humans may begin repopulating the area in about 600 years - give or take three centuries. The experts predict that, by then, the most dangerous elements will have disappeared - or been sufficiently diluted into the rest of the world’s air, soil and water. If our government can somehow find the money and political will power to finance the necessary scientific research, perhaps a way will be discovered to neutralize or clean up the contamination sooner. Otherwise, our distant ancestors will have to wait untill the radiation diminishes to a tolerable level. If we use the lowest scientific estimate, that will be 300 years from now……some scientists say it may be as long as 900 years.
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any-one remember the hit song by Nena -
99 Red Balloons guess what it’s about…..
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You and I in a little toy shop
Buy a bag of balloons with the money we’ve got
Set them free at the break of dawn
Til one by one, they were gone
Back at base bugs in the software
Flash the message, something’s out there
Floating in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
99 red balloons
Floating in the summer sky
Panic bells it’s red alert
There’s something here from somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky as 99 red balloons go by
99 Decision street
99 ministers meet
To worry, worry, super flurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we’ve waited for
This is it boys, this is war
The president is on the line
As 99 red balloons go by
99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by
99 dreams I have had
In every one a red balloon
It’s all over and I’m standing pretty
In this dust that was a city
If I could find a souvenir
Just to prove the world was here
And here is a red balloon
I think of you, and let it go
NOTE: These lyrics are from the English version of the song.
To see a literal translation of the German original, see: 99 Luftballons - English.
Text: Carlo Karges (English by Kevin McAlea)
Musik: J. U. Fahrenkrog-Petersen
I got back into surfing a few years ago, taking it easy with a longish board at Muizenburg, and was amazed at the style and dedication of small group of black kids who had taken up Long board surfing there as well. Here is a short pilot movie of the story of the man behind them . I even allowed them to use my music
Still awake as day is breaking
my spirit’s broken too
Fed on leeks, by now too weak
to speak when spoken to
Nannies, fussing with flannels
feeding the spaniel celery
These grey sickbay days
Slowly the sacred core decays
Above the bed the virgin’s head
perspective all askew
On the rail a grail of pale
medicinal gruel
Nurses, whispering verses
click shut their purses and depart
These grey sickbay days
Slowly the sacred core decays
——————–
from Desperate Straights - Henry Cow
jesus - Mandisa Bardill
giant - Sonni Chidiebere Ochuba
mary - Lesego Mabilo
director of photography - eran tahor
sound design - Warrick Sony
make up - Jade Snell
Produced and directed by Akin Omotoso
written and edited by Aryan Kaganof.
Inspired by Kaganof’s tale, Omotoso’s cinematic reading becomes a visionary plea for sanity/retribution/justice/compassion. I say visionary, because the solution flies in the face of conventional morality while tapping into the very real need in the collective unconscious for effective retribution. Like Jesus in the Bible, this Jesus invokes a justice where the punishment fits the crime. In manifesting this larger than life snippet of despicable reality, Omotoso has created the cinematic equivalent of a Damien Hirst ‘Golden Calf’ set in formaldehyde, yet goes beyond it. The formaldehyde is the plasticity of the cinematic medium (the celluloid) and the living ingredient frozen eternally in time yet moving with time, are the players who converge on this tragedy of violence to embody it with a mythological (if not divine) splendour.
This encounter therefore becomes (dare I say it?) a manifestation of ‘fifth dimensional art’ where the artwork, frozen in time yet simultaneously moving through time, is framed by and manifests the self same concept: the collision of opposites. Violence begets violence is turned inside out: violence demands violence - it is the only lesson that can be (terminally) understood.
This concept, so tragic a reality, has no practical application in reality.
It is far too controversial.
And yet it is no more controversial than the Bible itself.
Visually, Jesus doesn’t look as if she could hurt a fly, Mary’s beauty seems beyond deformation, and the Giant looks sufficiently virile not to have to resort to violence.
As such the drama is projected through an idealised reality extracted from a visceral actuality, where the only solution is the only solution.
It is in this realisation that all opposites converge towards a single coherent focus.
The application of the sum effect of this collision of opposites, distilled through Omotoso’s many years of contemplation/discernment before shooting began, heightens and informs every aspect of this film. This is the essential and existential ingredient - the distillation - that elevates Jesus and the Giant into the artistic phenomenon that it is.
Each frame has been perfectly captured by Eran Tahor (using a stills camera) in crisp clear sharpness and tone that seduces the viewer before he/she realises the import of the revolutionary message. Tahor is intuitively attuned to exactly the correct distance between subject and object creating a volume in the characters that seems to explode outwards. Each character thus becomes larger than life, enhancing the archetypical depth of the players. The images are pristine, without being sanitised thus underlining the ugliness of bullying. As much as the slaughter and dissemination of every part of the cow/bulls done by the street butchers appears gruesome and shocking, it is executed with deftness and precision where no part of the animal goes to waste. This is corroborated with the ‘exactitude’ of the Giants frame of mind with regard to women: he carries no doubt about his inherent misappropriation of values. The Giant’s disassociation is his deformity. His victim, whom he fails to see as a living pulsing human being, is but a thing to be controlled, kept in order: disseminated as a matter of course. Bullying is the tool he uses as a means to this end.
So when Jesus exercises her right to treat the Giant as he treats others, there is no blame to be found. To implement this ‘scale of justice’ Jesus has to find immense internal strength and as such she is able to meet the demand of her archetypal/mythological role: a female warrior who is not imbued with vengeance. No doubt this will have many women cheering in the audience.
In fact the solution becomes the epiphany for transformation and as such the protagonist finds redemption. In the closing sequence where we had previously seen still frame create movement, we now have film creating stillness. Once again ‘opposites melt into summation’ to drive a powerful point home.
The fact that Kaganof has edited the material to such perfection, (the inter slicing of the violence against the victim so intricately interwoven where the perpetrator is receiving his ‘come-uppance”, gives attention to an all too forgotten focus) bares testimony to the completion of a cyclic orchestration that was picked up from the written page by Omotoso’s visionary intellect and transformed back to him.
ps…. and for those who do not know, the fifth dimension is…..
BREATH!!
and whether by accident or design, whether by intention or intuitive connectivity, breath in “Jesus and the Giant’ has become an added dimension:
the technique of presenting the action of this film in animation i.e. through single frame, has meant that the film was recorded without sound, without voice, in silence.
The sheer logistics of getting the actors to voice-over must have proved quite daunting….
- not least of all the synchronisation with sound effect and action -
the female voices are not the voices of the characters themselves…
(Jesus - Moshidi Motshegwa and Helen Asrat
Mary - Bubu Mazibuko)
The sound technician and aural architect, Warrick Sony,
has thus discovered
(through direction from Akin Omotoso/liaison with Kaganof?)
an extremely unusual vocal dynamic in presenting the sound -
breathing life into the animation….
…is at once disassociated, and distanced
below normal audible levels, at times muffled, understated….
…drawing the viewer INTO the drama…..
…yet matching the visuals in tone and crispness….
magnifying its import and intensity
its closeness….proximity….
the collision of opposites…
one feels the sound/breath/life more intently
in the way in which it has been
enveloped by silence….
BREATH forming through silence into shape…..
this review first appeared on helgé janssen’s website
South Africa 2008 – 12 minutes
Director: Akin Omotoso
Producer: Akin Omotoso, Robbie Thorpe, Kgomotso Matsunyane
Script: Aryan Kaganof
Photography: Eran Tahor
Music & sound design: Warrick Sony
Editor: Aryan Kaganof
Cast: Mandisa Bardill, Sonni Chidiebere Ochuba, Lesego Mabilo
A raped and beaten woman called Mary arrives at Jesus’ door. Her attacker is her lover, the Giant. Jesus believes in peace but realizes that something has to be done. Grabbing a bass ball bat she goes to see the Giant. He is polite and full of concern for Mary. He explains to Jesus that to maintain dominance, women have to be beaten by their men. Abandoning peace for a moment, Jesus wallops the Giant so hard that he will never stand up again. A new balance in place, she can return to a being of peace. An unlikely collaboration of Aryan Kaganof (script and editing) – prolific high priest of transgression and Akin Omotoso (director) – Nigerian-born soap star, producer, director (God is African) and intellectual. Together they bring a mutual abhorrence of rape, handled before by both of them in Nice to Meet You, Please don’t Rape Me (Kaganof) and The Kiss of Milk (Omotoso) and a Jungian playfulness with archetypal characters. Jesus is transformed into a black woman – like her historical counterpart she brings peace but in this scripture she can only do so by violence. Mary, the virgin raped by Father God, here the Giant, is a catalyst for the confrontation between the Princess of Peace and the Angry Old Codger with a Coke Habit who she overcomes. Shot entirely on a digital stills camera (except for the final shot), 7000 stills are stitched together in a montage that is as audacious as the concept.
Q: How did you get involved in the project, Warrick?
Right place. Right time. I was up from Cape Town, phoned kaganof at the exact time that he was having discussions over who to use to design the sound track. As a sound artist I had also exhibited audio works exhibitions like Faultlines , The Brown & theGreen, and Adelaide Arts Festival. I had also done special SFX , design and mixing for various TV and Film commercials as well as a few specialist things like Tobe Hooper’s “Mangler” and Boormans “Country of My Skull” – my interest lies chiefly in the area where between music and sound manipulation. It is more satisfying for me to take overall responsibility for the soundtrack rather than just the music composition. Some one needs to be a bridge between the actual and the invented. I like the skill that people like Chris Watson can bring to the field of super real audio capture but I am more interested in the manipulation of those events to enhance the given action (or lack thereof)
Q: How did the shooting of the film on mobile phones affect your approach towards the Sound Design of the film?
There were 2 versions of the film and the approach to each was different.
The first version was very free and experimental; the plot floated in and out of focus – we tried to see how far we could manipulate picture and story with sound. The brief was to do a big Dolby stereo soundtrack which would knock people out .. and it did. It was great, we had time to do a good job.
It didn’t, however, enhance the story.
Version 2 saw a completely different edit and a narrative emerge which was clearer and more linear. We stripped out all extraneous sound and rebuilt the track to underscore the emotional drama. The cellphone thing became a dialogue about whether or not to do a huge sound mix or something more in keeping with the form ie something that used not so much the very fine work of Nico but more of the cameras own sound. More camera sound made its way into this version and we downgraded things. I really like a voice over we had going for a while which sounded like it was coming from a phone – we played with this a lot. It felt like you were hearing the conversation Sugar man was having with himself as if he’d phoned himself.
Q: What exchanges did you have with Kaganof – how did the two of you approach the Sound Design? How did you collaborate?
He had already laid down everything he wanted onto tracks in Final cut Pro , some very detailed music tracks were built up from the composed score and found music. I like the way he often used 2 or 3 pieces of music over each other to create a new piece. We used this as a way of developing the sound track throughout. I found often that the composers string score worked better reversed and pitch shifted and abstracted. This was more the case in version 2 where we tried to work with and tried to create an emotional dialogue. I was left to my own devices for 2 weeks and then we got together for a week and hammered everything into place.
Q: You are known for being very thorough and detailed. That you go and record strange sounds that can be used in many unique ways. Did you do this on SMS Sugar Man?
I have an extensive library of my own sonic work both real and composed. I have an eidetic memory of where everything is on my hard drives so when I work I can solve problems very quickly. The source sound in the movie was very good
Q: The images are very emotional. What specific sound did you try to achieve, what emotional counterpoint did you aim for?
In version one the composed music was designed for this particular purpose. It was often a case of taking a piece and adding a low frequency drone to enhance the feeling.
Q: The film is part narrative, part emotional diary; the sound plays a vital part in layering the story, in giving the film its unique feel. It is clearly the sound in his head, as much as it is representative sound that you see. Is this correct in understanding your approach to the sound?
More so in version one where the “real world “ is always ambiguous. We tried to play that up through the sound track. Even the voice-over was treated.
Q: You are well known also as the “Kalahari Surfer”, an original musician of many years and fame. Did you use any of your own music in the layering of the sound?
There was a need for a new composition in Version 2 ( much of the original score was not working or was axed with the scene for which it had been written) so we had to swop things around a lot.
There was a song I had done a few years ago and had put a poem read by Lydia Lunch over it. We used that track. “ The Human Animal” a great piece and this probably the one movie in the world where it would work.
Q: Part of the film is set in a hotel, which has a distinct affect – the sound of the hotel, its disturbing and consistent hum and buzz. What was your thinking in creating an almost horror aesthetic underneath the reality of the characters lives?
One of the first things I did was to go through all Nico’s sound and pull out the atmos tracks. I then spent a few days making new compositions from them; enhancing frequencies, beefing bass. dropping pitch. Combining them etc .. everything I could think of in an experimental sense. I put all these in a folder and kept them there ready for use. Often to combat room aircon noise in a dialogue scene I’d run 3 atmos tracks simultaneously. The very first thing was to get all the dialogue working in a premix situation. I work on Digidesign Protools software which is an industry standard and has great strengths in the area of film sound. Much of this work was done on this platform. I did it all myself and spent weeks on it. Especially tough were scenes with live sound inside a moving car. I am a fan of post synch films. I believe Americans make great movies because they treat the soundtrack as 50% of the film. Everything is created afterwards and time is budgeted for that. I respect this movies producers however for going the extra mile in the sound department route. Getting a top sound recordist in to do it and giving me the time to work it all into shape. The really experimental time shift morphing sound work was done with Ableton Live software all working through a dual core Intel Xeon Mac
Q: What films did you reference?
All David Lynchs movies and television works , I feel, are still relevant to todays sound creators. (even his weekly cartoon Angriest Dog) I think his partner , the late Alan Splett, was one of the greatest sound designers and possibly one of the first to be credited as such (along with Walter Murch whose work on Coppolas Godfather and Apocalypse Now movies I also find inspirational ) . More than watching movies, though, I found the book “Lynch on Lynch” by Chris Rodley a good reference to following ones own vision (it is a series of long biographical interviews.)
“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
