Bubblegum Club

Author: Christopher McMichael

  • Gaika – “Some Neon Lit Underworld”

    Gaika – “Some Neon Lit Underworld”

    Gaika‘s collision of dancehall, grime and ominous drone creates a charged atmosphere of dread.  As audiences to his recent performances in South Africa can attest, the UK musician and visual artist’s work powerfully evokes themes of confusion, terror and exploitation.

    Top by Y-3

    Via email, Gaika described this intensity as a response to the confusing social reality of the early 21st century.  “I don’t think I can make art divorced from reality, however fantastical it may seem. I think of my work as hyperreal in the sense that it amplifies our surroundings. I do see all the chaos and tension in the world explicitly, for sure. But I also really feel its beauty, I hope there is some of that in what I do too”.His projects to date have explored the space between intense anxiety and stark beauty. The mixtapes Machine and Security, and EPs Spaghetto and The Spectacular Empire 1, as well as his accompanying visual releases, place a deeply resonating patois above production which pushes R&B, trap and grime styles down a haunted, gothic path. The result is darkly alluring, as on the deceptively gentle ‘Glad We Found It‘, where a mournfully lovely synthesiser winds under lyrics like “it burns to love” and “this is my song for you, Now we’re dead”. While many artists are making dystopic electronic music, Gaika stands out for his concise lyricism. His break out song ‘Blasphemer’ announced itself with the hook “I’m watching TV when it’s not on”, a precise distillation of the contemporary sense that we are trapped in an endless loop of media voyeurism.

    2016’s Security narratively focused its menace on a conceptual journey through London nightlife. When I asked Gaika about its origin and inspiration, he suggested that it was “about fear, money and dying, inspired by my time getting my ankles wet in some neon lit underworld. The truth is there, if you know what to listen for”. The word security conjures images of control, rigidity and surveillance cameras watching over clinical spaces. But the album sounds profoundly out of control, with Gaika’s howling tales of nights lost under a blizzard of drugs, guns, money or worse. At first listen, lyrics like “I’m getting smashed like the world ain’t real”, seem to echo the depressive hedonism of Future or The Weeknd. But while those artists can never seem to identify the causes of their existential malaise, Gaika pulls a brilliant rhetorical move with the closing song ‘White Picket Fences‘. Guest MC 6Cib precisely details the true roots of mass feelings of insecurity, firing off at war mongering politicians, corporate greed and pacifying consumerist values. Security joins the dark British pantheon of dystopian music, conjuring images of police cars on fire, illuminating riotous tower blocks. Its most recent ancestors are the black hole bass of Kode9 and the Spaceape’s Memories of the Future or The Bug’s London Zoo. But you can trace it back even further to David Bowie’s 1974 album Diamond Dogs, where the singer essayed the imagined collapse of society with a mix of despair and relish.

    Later in 2016, Gaika dropped perhaps his most hard hitting release to date, ‘3D’, with its opening verse of – “This is my city and these are my streets, in a state of emergency/ This is my city and these are my streets and it’s murder out here”.

    Top by Floyd Avenue

    As the title allusively hints, it’s also a song about the racist and classist imaginaries which fuel police killings and the role of the cultural industry in reinforcing these destructive tropes – ” Our bodies as props to the jewels and the glocks, that’s the only narrative that we see”. It becomes a song not just about violence, but about the nature of perception itself.

    The inspiration came from an unexpected source – “3D glasses are the one, like the old school ones with the red and blue lenses.  When I was a kid I wanted to wear them all the time. The song is about the perception of black male artistry in Europe/America. I think it’s often a bit flat from the outside. I think it’s ok to be contradictory. To be a developed human and to do gangster shit”.

    With his most recent work Spectacular Empire 1, Gaika expands his hyperreal vision into the future. The two track release includes the stirring ‘Battalion’, a collaboration with Miss Red which is sung from the perspective of a future bike gang member. The ambiguous words leave it unclear if they are homaging a human lover or an advanced machine.

    Cape by Don Zondo

    The EP came with an richly detailed text piece where Gaika imagines the next 50 years of geopolitics, with London ruled by omnipotent warlords and the rise of “walled-in fascist republics” under the iron fist of an adult Barron Trump. The text works as a satire of our current political malaise, while retaining a disturbing plausibility. Gaika modestly describes how “I just wrote what I thought might happen and tried to make it make sense, I wrote it over a few days as a framework to some music and visuals I was making. I like to make complete worlds that pieces inhabit but normally this kind of thing stays firmly hidden on my hard drive. Somehow it got out. I’m glad though”.

    According to the theorist Mark Fisher contemporary life is defined by the creeping sense that “The catastrophe… is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart”. It’s that sense of creeping dread you get when reading on your Facebook timeline about the melting Artic, or the latest electoral victories of xenophobic politicians. But Gaika’s darkly luminous work not only paints a picture of our time, it makes you want to question and change it.

    Credits:

    Photography by Obakeng Molepe

    Direction & Styling by Rich Mnisi

    Grooming: Orli Meiri 

  • Swiss electronic composer Aïsha Devi to release new Album

    Swiss electronic composer Aïsha Devi to release new Album

    When I opened the link for Swiss electronic composer Aïsha Devi‘s ‘Mazdâ‘, I had no idea that I was about to be yanked out of space and time. The song stretches her vocals to breaking point over deep, stabbing synths. This alluring music scores images of a lysergic dance of uncanny bodies, Buddhist icons and lush vegetation shrouded in smoke, taking place in what looks like a decadent ceremonial chamber. I felt completely disoriented- was this heaven or hell, from the forbidden past or some savage future? It was both enticing and sinister, and hard to tell if this was an amazing piece of performance art or the final orgiastic blowout of a doomsday cult.

    Recovered from this synaptic assault, I discovered that the video accompanied her 2015 album Of Matter and Spirit, with the visuals being provided by the transgressive Chinese artist Tianzhuo Chen. The ritualistic intensity displayed in the video was not merely an impressive spectacle, but central to her artistic project. She uses her powerful vocal range, veering from the angelic to the guttural, and bone crunching beats to summon collective spiritual experiences. As the title of Devi’s latest track ‘Inner State of Alchemy‘, from the forthcoming DNA Feelings (available in May 2018) suggests, she is looking for nothing less than the hidden gold of the human spirit.

    Album Cover by Niels Wehrspann

    Born in the Alps, and with Nepalese and Tibetan roots, Aïsha Devi’s current work was inspired by a deep period of personal questing, with her immersion in meditation and ancient knowledge culminating in a transformative experience in the Tunisian desert. Alongside her solo production, Devi is also one of the founders of the Danse Noire label.

    Her upcoming release is sure to put her at the forefront of artists exploring a post-club space, where electronic music becomes a key to unlock what her new album calls the Hyperlands of human consciousness.

  • Gqom Oh! strikes again with The Originators EP

    Gqom Oh! strikes again with The Originators EP

    It’s been two years since the Gqom Oh! label released the compilation The Sound of Durban, a superb survey of the ferocious electronic music pumping out of KZN. Created by young bedroom producers in the townships and suburbs which ring the coastal city, and played on raucous dance floors and powerful taxi sound systems, gqom centres ominous drums and menacing loops. The aesthetic intensity responds to harsh social conditions, with journalist Kwanele Sosibo calling it “the CNN of The RDP townships”. But outside of its Durban strongholds, gqom was viewed with scepticism or even hostility, derided as the unruly proletarian step-child of upwardly mobile house and kwaito. Abroad however, it was recognised as an important new strain of dance music, with Rome-based Nan Kolè establishing Gqom Oh! as an international platform for Durban artists.

    Locally, the musical landscape has shifted dramatically since 2016. Gqom inspired music is all over the mainstream, with self-styled ‘Gqom Queen’ Babes Wodumo even appearing on Kendrick Lamar’s massive Black Panther soundtrack. Such a cultural moment makes it important to recognise the potentially overlooked creators and places who originated the style. This latest five track vinyl (with four extras included on the digital release) surveys the past, present and future of gqom. The opulent cover art announces the project’s intent. The featured artist are placed among palm trees, taxis, Diwali fireworks and the Moses Mabhida stadium, highlighting the geography gqom has blossomed in, with roaring flames and a lion to representing its musical power.

    Side A begins with DJ Lag’s ‘Daisies’. Despite his young age, Lag is one of the most prominent producers working, with his stunning music video for ‘Ice Drop’ being possibly the best visual document of the gqom scene to date. He is joined by the legendary Griffit Vigo, who escalates ‘Ree’s Vibe’ from a few simple beats to a sprawling sonic adventure.

    The second side explores different shades of Gqom. Naked Boys hypnotic ‘Story Teller’, with its earworm hook of “what’s the story” represents sgubhu, the hybrid gqom-house style which is all over the radio. Rude Boyz end the vinyl on a stirring note with the imaginative ‘Umshudo’. But the real stand out is Sbucardo da DJ‘s ‘Iphoyisa’, with guest vocalist Abnormal laconically reciting the Zulu lyrics “We at the club, Mr. Policeman don’t disturb us”. Built on top of a sinister synthesiser loop, it reflects the key influence of rap on the evolution of gqom.

    With worthwhile bonus tracks by the same artists on the digital release, The Originators is another excellent work by Gqom Oh!, showing both the roads the genre has taken and what future horizons it may looking toward.

    As an exclusive, Bubblegum Club readers can stream the compilation for a limited time below, with both formats available for purchase at Bandcamp. Keep the gqom fire burning!

  • OneBeat – Heard Around the World

    South African musicians are enjoying more hard-earned international exposure than ever. After getting an email from Drake’s camp, DJ Black Coffee was featured on the superstar’s More Life project. A Twitter DM, brought Petite Noir’s magisterial voice to Danny Brown’s Atrocity Exhibition. But the actual grind of getting passports, tickets and winning fans through touring is made harder by fluctuating exchanges rates and sheer physical distance.

    For the last seven years, the OneBeat fellowship has been offering some redress by bringing talented young musicians, from around the world, to the U.S for residency and performance. Organised by the U.S State Department in collaboration with the Found Sound Nation Collective, it offers emerging professional musicians a period to produce original music and to plan projects in their home countries. This is followed by a national tour, with public performances from small jazz clubs to huge street festivals.

    Jeremy Thal, one of the founders, explained the vision behind it as one of communication: ” one of our earliest slogans was ‘ musical collaboration across the world and across the block’. Often the most difficult cultural barriers are not dividing people in Chicago from folks in the Congo, but dividing folks in Chicago and the Congo from their neighbors. Collaborative music-making, when approached with the right spirit, can serve to bridge these divides”. For him, “music is a very visceral and quick way to communicate. And the key elements to bridging these cultural gaps is participation and co-creation”. And so, the fellowship encourages participants to continue engagement in their home countries, with one of the alumni bands performing at next month’s Cape Town Jazz Festival.

    The fellowship is open to musicians, aged 19-35, in any genre.  Previous years have promoted a rich variety of homegrown talent. An early recipient was Mpumelelo Mcata, the fiercely innovative guitarist of BLK JKS, followed by violinist Kyla-Rose Smith, bassist Benjamin Jephta and folk singer Bongeziwe Mabandla. Most recently, it hosted unique voices Nonku Phiri and Mandla Mlageni.

    The applications for this year are open until the 9th of February, 5 PM (Eastern Standard Time, USA). Successful candidates will start with a three week residency at the Atlantic Centre for the Arts, followed by a tour of New York, Baltimore, Charleston SC and Washington DC.  More information and applications can be found at 1beat.org.

  • Felix Laband – Second Unit Archive

    These days, suddenly losing access to a computer is a huge impediment. Priceless work and memories disappear. It’s even worse when your device gets stolen, as recently happened to legendary South African electronic producer Felix Laband, whose laptop was grabbed from his car at the end of last year. In an emotive Facebook post, he bleakly detailed that the theft cost him six months’ worth of new music. As an independent artist, without insurance, this left him without a machine to work on. Like losing part of your soul for a musician.

    But one of the advantages of this computer dependent age is that artists can reach out directly to their fans via social media. For musicians trying to exist outside of the shrinking corporate label space this is a lifeline, and Felix’s ardent followers have poured in with offers of moral support and help with finding a new device. As a thank you, Laband has been going back to the earliest days of his career and uploading songs from his teenage band Second Unit onto Soundcloud. Recorded in Pietermaritzburg in 1995, ‘Having to Hold’ is delicate, almost ambient song with a gentle vocal line buried beneath the hum of synthesizers. The song is clearly indebted to the post-punk electronic pioneers he was obsessed with as an adolescent, but is produced with the confidence and care of a promising young creative voice.

    Within a few years, he would be blending local influences from kwaito and house with chilly synthwave to produce the classic albums Thin Shoes in June (2001) and Dark Days Exit (2005). These releases gave him a cult following as one of the most original electronic artists this country has ever been produced. His work was further exposed to millions of unsuspecting listeners when SABC decided to use the catchy, yet subtly sinister, ‘Donkey Rattle’ as the soundtrack to anti-drinking campaign. For almost a decade, Laband was out of the public eye but has been enjoying a major resurgence since Deaf Safari (2015). To lose a major body of work during a second artistic wind seems a cruel twist. But by returning to his earliest work, he’s doing more than just connecting with the fans who’ve reached out during a dark time. Uploading the work of his adolescent self is a means to connect with his raw creative origins, to light the fire to face the challenges ahead.

     

  • Umlilo and Whyt Lyon – Glory Bois

    One of the most visually opulent artists working today, Umlilo has been winning ears and hearts with their bold fusion of kwaito, rap and bubblegum pop. Since their debut EP in 2013, Umlilo’s project has been exploring the tragedies and triumphs of life in a world of repressive gender politics. Their artistic comrades in the struggle is the Johannesburg electro-rap Stash Crew. Frustrated by the erasure of LGBTQ identity in mainstream culture, they combined their talents in 2016 with the “Queer Galactic Alliance” world tour, thrilling audiences with raucous live shows in Brazil and Germany. Their aim was to attack the Death Star of toxic conservatism, promoting “glitter anarchy” on the streets.

    The performance collaboration has extended into the new DL Boi a song and video featuring Umlilo and Stash Crew rapper Whyt Lyon. The music video is an extravaganza of fashion and movement. Filmed in Melville’s Glory nightclub, it intercuts grainy, VHS-style scenes of nightlife with crystal clear choreography, conceptualised to show off “Joburg’s fiercest queer talent”. Directed by Jono Kay, its choreography scenes focus on internationally renowned performers Henk Opperman and Lllewellyn Lulubelle Mnguni. The intensive costuming was provided by designer Caroline Olavarrieta, with makeup by Orli Meiri and Dylosaurus Rex creating a world of glamorous retrofuturism.

    The lushness of the images complements the driving simplicity of the song itself. DL Boi is a massive-sounding pop song, with a relentless beat throbbing like strobe lights under a chorus hook of “If you want me let you know”. It sounds instantly classic, like hearing a forgotten house anthem from the early ’90s. The song’s title references a ‘down low brother’, a closeted gay man trying to secretly hook up with gay men. In the hands of Umlilo and Whyt Lyon, this scenario becomes a tale of brash self-assertion, delivered with utterly compelling visual and musical flair.

  • The Big Hole Counter Narrative Project

    The official webpage of the Big Hole “experience” in Kimberley offers the story of the diamond rush from the winner’s perspective “the visitors centre tells the multi-faceted story of diamonds, of the people that sought them, the tools they used and the wealth they generated”. The wording politely focuses on the successes of colonialists like Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Banato, while avoiding the reality of the exploitation and systematic dispossession of black mineworkers.

    With their new project, artists Francois Knoetze and Theogene Niwenshuti and musician Mkhululi Mabija (in collaboration with Sol Plaatjie University under Carina Truyts) set out to attack this historical airbrushing.  Combining a series of visual and performance interventions, their aim was ” to disrupt odious colonial narratives that romanticize the town’s history of diamond extraction”.

    In stark contrast, this project highlights the myriad of ways in which diamonds have cursed Kimberley. A short film made to document the work is book ended with a model of the city being decimated by volcanic lava pouring out of the Hole and over the surrounding buildings. In an Adam Curtis style montage, archive shots of the rich wearing diamonds are intercut with scenes of the harsh reality of mine life under Apartheid.  Sound tracked, of course, by Diamonds are Forever. Knoetze has gained praise for his innovative mask work in his previous Cape Mongo series, which he continues here with witty scenes of a grotesque Cecil John Rhodes prowling the malls of modern Kimberley. The film skillfully includes the participation of a community members, with a great scene of teenagers visiting a casino and wisely concluding ” diamonds are money and make people mad”.

    As South Africa faces an increasingly unstable future, the project is a great example of how socially engaged art can tackle the traumatic and unresolved past.

    Watch the film here – https://vimeo.com/236421248

  • Angel-Ho: The Devil’s Hour

    What does punk means in 2017? Is it just a style of music and clothes, buzzsaw guitars and leather jackets? An ossified museum piece, rather than an alive aspect of culture? Or is it an attitude of fearlessness, a sense of both “fuck you” nihilism and the desire for something better.

    In 1978, the infamous synth punk band Suicide toured with The Clash. But there confrontational performance was too much for their supposedly open-minded audience, with singer Alan Vega gleefully reminiscing about a show where someone threw an axe at his head ” I guess we were too punk even for the punk crowd”. Suicide had the last laugh though, influencing all kind of dark electronic music.

    Continuing this legacy is Angel-Ho aka Angelo Valerio aka Deep in The Pussy aka Ruffle Queen. For the 2016 performance piece Red Devil, they dressed as the titular character, waving fire around at performances which shocked the audiences at art fairs across Europe.

    And now the recorded component of this work is being unleashed with the appropriately punk motto, “it’s that moment when you really don’t give a single fuck and blossom into the person you see yourself to be”. Another great release from NON Worldwide, a label which they confounded, the Red Devil LP is nine tracks of brutal bliss. The music is always intense, bordering on industrial. But from amidst the harsh digital hellscape is a palpable yearning for freedom, a world of glamour and defiance.

    The work is inspired by the everyday horrors faced by black and brown, queer and femme bodies, where just leaving the home is fraught with danger. Angel imagines spitting and strutting in this face of this cruel world, with production that pops like glass being cracked under heels, of “moffie only, klopse troupe roaming through their neighborhood at 2am in the summer with their sharpened instruments ghostly parading the echo of their afternoon rehearsals.”

    Red Devil, at Donaufestival 2016

     

  • Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll In New York City 2001-2011

    Ever since age 12, when I nicked a copy of Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana, I’ve been a gluttonous consumer of rock and roll histories.  A good book has the following key elements: ambitious young dreamers start making music, get some success, then dramatically struggle with inflated egos, wild substance abuse and music industry perfidy. And then either prevail or lose it completely. Sometimes it’s a difficult reading about the flaws of people you greatly admire. I’m still gutted by a Lou Reed biography which exhaustively detailed how he was a complete bastard. And I will even devour works about people whose music I couldn’t care less about. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve read The Dirt: The Oral History of Motley Crue no less than three times, just because its portrait of 80s heavy metal depravity is so absurd. Their bassist overdosed, was declared dead and resuscitated, told the doctors to fuck off and went home and overdosed again – all on the same day!

    Fortunately for me, Lizzy Goodman’s massive Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll is about bands I care very much about. The book follows the explosive rise of the New York bands who culturally dominated rock music in the early 2000s – The Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, TV On The Radio, Liar etc. I was so excited when I found out this book was coming out, because these were the bands that soundtracked my late teens and early twenties. And this wasn’t just a musical influence either. At one point I had the fashion too, with the Converse All Stars, the skinny jacket and the delusional belief that being really greasy and chain-smoking was cool. That style was championed by The Strokes, whose meteoritic rise to fame in 2001 galvanized a wave of bands making stylish, punk-inspired music which contrasted sharply with the cretin nu-metal of the day. Goodman exhaustively details the antics of bands like Interpol, who dressed like morticians but lived like Caligula. As their drummer Sam Fogarino puts it, “yes, I was worried – it was like these guys are not just cokeheads, they’re waking up with beers in their hands”. But this climate of hedonism also fuelled creativity. James Murphy overcame a lifetime of self-doubt and failure while dancing on ecstasy – “it was like he just flipped a switch and decided to start winning”. With his label DFA and his band LCD Soundsystem he pioneered a fusion of punk ethics and dance production, becoming an unlikely rock star while well into his thirties. But LCD’s rise also saw the toxic fall of his friendship with his collaborator Tim Goldsworthy, who hisses “I literally could have stabbed him in the throat quite easily. I had weird reoccurring dreams of Game of Thrones style deaths for him”.

    Photograph of the lead singer of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Karin O

    The New York bands were a rapid inspiration to an “international degenerate underground” like the British Libertines, whose singer Pete Doherty makes a memorable appearance trying to steal credit cards from The Strokes. Within the city itself, Goodman argues that there was a noticeable split between “bands who wanted to do blow with waitresses at three in the morning“ and more personally sedate types like TV On The Radio, The Dirty Projectors and Grizzly Bear. But despite the book showing the usual struggles with fame and narcotics it ends on a relatively wholesome note, with no one dying and many of the featured bands continuing to release music. In fact, LCD Soundsystem have just released the excellent American Dream, giving them their first Billboard Number One in the US.

    The darker aspect of the book comes not from personal excess but the brutal forces of the market. Bands unwittingly aided in gentrification, with the image of cool they reflected being used to push real estate to astronomical prices in New York. TV On The Radio had to abandon their studio in Brooklyn due to rent increases, with singer Tunde Adebimpe observing “we warmed it up for fuckers”. The contradictions of privilege were baked into the scene from the off, with The Strokes famously meeting at prep schools for wealthy reprobates.  Two decades later, hipster lead gentrification has made the urban life they eulogized incredibly difficult for young people without independent wealth. As Sam Wetherell recently argued this had a dire effect on rock music – “the working class music scene of a generation ago – Joy Division, Pulp, even The Beatles – has been replaced with the peevish aristocratic pomp of Mumford and Sons”.

    The musical scene depicted in the book also suffered from an apolitical atmosphere, with the events of September 11th only encouraging many to party like the world was ending. A lot of the music retrospectively seems to come from a more frivolous time, where ecological collapse and geopolitical mayhem didn’t seem like everyday facts of life. The one exception was TV On The Radio, who were for a few years the most progressive, exciting rock band anywhere in the world. On their 2006 masterpiece Return To Cookie Mountain, they channeled apocalyptic dread into a sprawling songs about global warming, war and doomed relationships. Guitarist and producer Dave Sitek remembers “we couldn’t avoid talking about it… I was thinking about getting laid and now I’m thinking about dying in the fucking eternity”. That’s a sentiment that feels even more visceral in 2017.

  • Mana – Creatures of The Night

    Seeing the Hyperdub logo on a new release is a sure fire guarantee of headphone ecstasy. Since 2004, the UK based label has been at the bleeding edge of electronic music, regularly releasing classic albums from Burial, Kode 9 and The Spaceape, DJ Rashad, Hype Williams and Laurel Halo.  Its early day were strongly associated with menacing  UK dubstep, but has grown to explore micro genres from Chicago footwork to Chinese inspired futurism.  But all its artists share a raison d’eitre for bass heavy, deeply emotive music, which looks to the future while engaging the soul.

    Joining this starry rooster is Italian producer Daniele Mana. Formerly active under the name Vaghe Stelle, he has just released the eight song EP Creature as Mana.  The EP comes with one of the most enticing press releases I’ve read all year, ‘’On Creature, over eight tracks, [Mana] ingests Shostakovitch, Drexciya, Darkthrone, Frank Ocean, and Paul Lansky, and refashions them into an almost operatic record — a rich melodrama of dark tension and excitable in-your-face synth melodies.’’ The seemingly incongruous references to the underground techno of Drexciya and Norwegian black metal legends Darkthrone actually makes sense, because Mana makes nocturnal music which shines brightest in the dark.

    The EP starts with the ghostly Fade, with distorted vocals overlaid over what sounds like pipe organs from a drowned cathedral. With a bang, it’s followed Crystalline, a deceptively minimal synthesiser driven piece which reveals hidden layers as it earworms into your brain. The beautiful Sei Nove could come straight from an Italian giallo, evoking mental images of protagonists being chased through gothic castles and dreadful secrets.

    Yet again, Hyperdub have exposed an exciting new talent. Like many of their releases its best enjoyed at the witching hour, watching neon reflect off the rain soaked streets.

    [bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=2568421524 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

  • KOKOKO! – Surviving the Future

    The Kinshasa based collective KOKOKO! have been gaining international exposure, with even Time Magazine giving coverage to a video introducing their work. Footage of frenetic Congolese night life is intercut with the group’s improvised performances. Most notably, they use objects from glass bottles to typewriters as instruments. But such lo-fi production is no gimmick, as the group was unable to afford conventional equipment when they started out.  As one member puts it in their video “survival is creativity”.

    Along with the DIY instruments, comes a punk charged worldview. The collective is explicit about their political message, with their music critiquing the greed and exploitation around them. As their website manifesto puts it “With the constant degradation of their quality of life, Kinshasa’s youth began to question the taboo of ‘respect for one’s elders’ – denouncing the state of a society paralyzed by fear. This spirit of protest is KOKOKO!… the soundtrack of Kinshasa’s tomorrow”.

     

    The group originally coalesced around throwing intense live performances, but with the recruitment of French producer Debruit have been expanding their recorded output. The two track Tokoliana EP is the result, a bracing blast of post-punk asperity and edgy psychedelic exploration. The title track is a hypnotic protest against the cannibalistic reality of capitalism, with lyrics depicting a society where the weak are devoured whole. In contrast with the bleak theme, the song sounds exuberant with infectious synthesizers overlaid by a chanted chorus.

    This unique work is epitomized by its cover art, which shows a crouched man surrounding by foliage, wearing a VR mask made out of leaves. An image of an ingenious future cobbled together from whatever resources are at hand. Working through initial material limitations, KOKOKO! are thriving on the bleeding edge of wherever music is going next.

  • Francois Knoetze – Escaping the Frontier

    The immersive technology of virtual reality has world shaking implications. Something as small as a VR headset can destabilize the core categories of dream and flesh which make up consensual reality. With the new show Virtual Frontiers, artist Francois Knoetze is using VR to disrupt the historical categories which continue to infect contemporary South Africa with poverty and violence. Over six short films, his 360 camera maps the psychogeography of Grahamstown, and how the stark racial and social divisions in the town make it a microcosm of the country at large. The film’s wildly merge reenactments, archive footage and special effects to blur the past into the present. The follow up to his acclaimed Cape Mongo series, the new work will be premiered at this year’s National Arts festival.

    Via email, Francois shared some of the themes which underpin his ambitious project

    I’m fascinated by your psychogeography of Grahamstown, and the focus on the past bleeding into the present. Were there any specific historical events, or even things in your own experience, which inspired you to take this approach. And did  Rhodes Must Fall also play a part for you? 

    Growing up during the Rainbow Era, I lapped up my fair share of the almost propaganda-like optimism that flavoured the public discourse of those years. I think my approach to making art is often informed by my distrust for neat, grand narratives. It forms part of a process of unlearning the inclination towards neat categories, binaries and conclusions.

    It’s also an attempt at addressing the ahistorical nature of the Rainbow rhetoric, and how it managed to gloss over the burning question of reparations for 350 years of plundering. ‘94 was branded as an endpoint to colonialism and racism, and I think a lot of people just sort of bought it because it was convenient and colourful. The Marikana massacre showed that the government’s propensity towards militaristic death squad tactics against peacefully protesting black workers was not dissimilar to that of the Apartheid state. And movements such as Rhodes Must Fall opened my eyes to just how far South Africa still has to go in terms of restructuring institutions, syllabi, professions, and economics. We, the white minority, remain seemingly unperturbed or in denial about the dubious origins of our power and privilege, hiding behind security companies, high walls and #zumamustfalls, like the forts of yesteryear. Virtual Frontiers is in part an attempt to make sense of my position within this historical juncture by looking at the effects and systems which organise the way people experience the small, yet extremely fractured city of Grahamstown.

    How do you feel the concept of the frontier impacts on post-colonial, contemporary South Africa?

    I think post-coloniality is a term at odds with the lived experience of most South Africans, the structuring of its cities and its economy. Frontiers are barriers that separate, but like outer space they are also great unknown territories to be explored. I think post-coloniality is in many ways an unexplored frontier in South Africa. I think it is necessary to tear down the barriers that maintain the colonial ordering of people, commodities and spaces. I believe this would open up space for the emergence of a more inclusive society that embraces its Africanness, and doesn’t simply package a superficial version of it for tourist consumption.

    What inspired the use of virtual reality, and do you feel that VR is something that is going to become more socially and politically significant in the near future?

    I started experimenting with virtual reality whilst on residency in Dar es Salaam last year. For me, being able to place the viewer into immersive first-person scenarios raises fundamental questions around positionality and reconciling the giant rifts in the lived experiences of people in a place as divided as South Africa. It puts you, as the viewer, inside of the work, pushing beyond the screen so it has a raw, experiential power that pure film doesn’t. It’s the first medium that makes the leap from representation to experience. The social and political significance of an artistic medium that allows you to experience what you perceive as physical closeness is unprecedented.