Bubblegum Club

Tag: band

  • TCIYF: Soweto thrash punk, the rare breed and the raw edge

    TCIYF are a dirty-riffed, crass, thrash punk band with Pule on vocals, Thula on guitar, Tox on bass, and Jazz on drums.  Started by members of the Skate Society Soweto family, they’re leading the rule-breaking, Sowetan skate and rock revolution with their uninhibited, conformist-refusal; spitting-out in vulgar lyrics and frantic drum smashes. Fuck your civilisation, with the uncensored and inappropriate thrust of hard-ons and hot tempers. Are you softer if you don’t have to face it?

    Most of the articles I’ve read about them say they don’t give a fuck. But that’s bullshit; they just don’t give a fuck about things they’re told to with no reason. They actively smash empty nine-to-five high regard. They’re making new meaning through their own kind of value. These members sweat against the system that would have them punch their lives into the monotonous grind of no-hope. They’re a generation of redefine; tearing down as they build; making the songs, making the videos, making the art, making the events, making the half-pipes, making the subversive sub-culture in all of its unrestrained and unrefined, DIY glory.

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    It’s self-written, it uses its hands, it’s a fever that licks to the bone and brings blood together. Fatherless kids choosing their family in punk-fuck freedom. It can see the sexless suck-dry and the hollow-out, the ‘two rand, two rand’ Nyaope zombies skulking new victims through the night. It knows the way the haunt takes hold, and the way you have to shake it out; makes spaces for bodies to jump and fall and be lifted and shoved-forward in abandon. They can see you and they’ve got you; real care buried in the reckless purge.

    No one’s going to seize this. It’s got the speed of where it comes from. It’s a kind of sacred profanity. Strung-out sincerity unfiltered at five in the morning. It’s a code that can’t be commodified, held up in the kind of respect you never have to articulate to understand; it’s checking-in with your grandmother, turning off the TV, chilling in the crowd before the show, not replacing your brother when he has to disappear for a year, working hard without fronting, disrupting the stage-space by being on the floor with your friends. It’s a new ritual of youth unhindered, staring death down, because no matter what, you’ll have what you created; the justified rage of the impossible moment made real.  If all you can see is the filth of provocation, then you can get lost; this is a forceful stripping-down of all the crap that crowds in and it’ll always move faster than your patronising condescension.

    Keep glued to TCIYF Facebook page for their upcoming full-length album, kicking-in soon with rapist-slayers and crash-landings from outer space. You can also catch them live, in all their gritty imperfection, at the Hostile Takeover in June. Smash it up and hand it over. The rare breed and the raw edge. Bite more than you can chew. And keep going harder… together; faster, faster, faster, until there’s cum in your face.

  • Lenny-Dee: Brightness and Darkness

    For her cover feature with BubblegumClub Lenny-Dee Doucha, the lead singer and keyboardist of Bye Beneco, wanted to mix the contemporary and the traditional.  Photographed by Charlemagne Oliver at the National School of Arts Campus in Braamfontein, the concept was to merge Art Deco and Japanese motifs.  The Art Deco style speaks to glamorous modernism with a focus on precise design and elegant geometry. The photographs convey this through Lenny’s subtly glamorous accoutrements- the snow white sunglasses, the stem of the cocktail glass. This is complemented by her floral shawl and scarf, which hint at the Japanese influence. Flowers have a particular importance in Japanese aesthetics, with their rich pallet of colours conveying a powerful spectrum of emotion.

    The photos also speak to Lenny-Dee’s broader artistic project ‘’ The shoot merges a classical time with the now, which is kinda where I see myself.’’  Bye Beneco was established in 2012, ‘’ The story of the name is based on an enigmatic fictional character we once wrote about.’’ They released their debut album Space Elephant in 2014, which was recognized with a SAMA nomination for best alternative album. The group’s line up also consists of Bergen Nielson (drums, guitar) and Matthew Watson (guitar) and they describe their style as ‘’eclectic dream-pop with a dark underlying spirit.’’ They are currently working on a EP which will be released next month as a taster for their second album.

    The group is inspired by a diverse set of artists, but ‘’ we do all have one thing in common – we’re kids of the 90s.’’  Growing up in that decade meant that rock, rap and electronic music were all part of the cultural menu. Bye Beneco reflect this heritage with their mixing of guitar and drums with synthetic beats. One of the highlights on Space Elephant is Witch Port, which combines a loop which sounds like a less clinically depressed version of The Weeknd’s The Party & The After Party with gentle percussion.  They cannily use melody to smuggle in a darker agenda, like on Vampire in which dejected lyrics are combined with a sparkling melody and rousing outro. Lenny suggests that they are closest in spirit to a hybrid of chill wave and hip hop.  In a similar vein to Animal Collective or Neon Indian they work experimental sounds into their pop hooks.  Although their hip hop influence isn’t overt, it’s clearly there in the use of repetition and incorporation of diverse styles.

    Bye Beneco also project a powerful visual identity. As titles like Witch hint at there is dark undertone to their music and they have regularly played this up in  music videos which are as she puts it ‘’ mind pools of cult craziness.’’  The visuals for On The Line are colourful but speak to a midnight world of dark forests, weird rites under the moon and non-human forces. Like some occult ritual it’s both alluring and disorientating, coming from a right brain realm of myth and symbols.  This approach gets especially feverish in the all-out surrealism of Chemirocha, which mixes Frida Khalo, UFOs and other unexpected elements. As Lenny-Dee told us, the song itself has quite  the history:

    The story of Chemirocha is a remarkable one. I came across the original traditional arrangement whilst recording Space Elephant and naturally did some more research on it. The recording dates back to WWII when an ethnomusicologist traveled to Kenya. He had records of popular American yodeler, Jimmie Rodgers which he played on a gramophone for the Kipsigi Tribe. The villagers were taken by the music and started worshipping Rodgers as their ‘half antelope-half human’ God. They called him ‘Chemirocha’. The original song is sung by the young girls of the village. We loved the story and loved the song and wanted to do something with it. Nothing will ever match the original composition but we couldn’t resist taking it on.

    With such a strongly defined sonic and visual aesthetic in place Bye Beneco will soon be exporting their vision abroad. Next month, they will be taking their unique vision to Germany, Switzerland, Amsterdam and the UK.

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    Credits:

    Photographer: Charlemagne Olivier

    Styled by: Lenny-Dee Doucha

    Make-up: Orli Oh Meiri

    Location: National School of Arts