The brainchild of South African electronic music stalwart, Markus Wormstorm, Drop Shop is a week-long incubator that brings together established and more up-and-coming producers to create a thirty-minute mix of original techno. “It started with this feature film which I was commissioned to do called ‘Sounds of Animals Fighting’ which takes place in South Africa and São Paulo, Brazil. To enrich my creative process I thought I’d set up a system through which I could collaborate with an artist from São Paulo and get to make some stuff in the studio with them and then use this music in the film. When I started putting it together I thought why don’t we go further and get a whole bunch of electronic producers together.” explains Markus.
Meeting in April 2018, the week featured Narch, Maxime Alexander, Felix Laband, D_Know, Whosane and Paulo Tessuto from São Paulo. The latter is known for his Carlos Capslock squat parties thrown in São Paulo as well as his record label MEMNTGN. He has established himself on the Brazilian and Berlin underground, playing the likes of Mezcaleria Lupita, Tresor, Golden Gate, Sisyphos, Chalet, SchwuZ. Describing them as ‘X-Men-like’, each with their own speciality, the week saw each producer bring two original loops which were then remixed and developed by the rest of the team. A stark contrast to the usual conditions in which electronic producers usually work, alone with minimal input from outside sources, Drop Shop saw them crammed together in a room packed with synths and drum machines at Honeymoon Studios working on tracks together and playing these live together as a unit. “When we got together each day was dedicated to a certain amount of tracks, we’d sit down and play each other what we did for a loop and then I’d choose which parts we’d use and then we’d come up with a sequence to play it live.”
From Narch’s bass-heavy Arp Odyssey to Felix Laband’s mysterious vocal samples, D_Know’s driving rhythms, the creative melodies of Maxime Alexander and the curious rhythms of Paulo Tessuto, the various elements were brought together by Markus. Ensuring that everything flowed together rather than clashing. Jamming and recording the tracks live meant that the group was able to record more than 8 tracks over the course of 3 days, which ultimately resulted in a 30-minute mix of original techno that drifts from dark and driving to melodic and uplifting. With a raw sound, it’s clear the mix was made live on machines rather than produced within the neat confines of a computer.
Aiming to continue the concept for the next few years, Markus hopes to bring in producers from other countries. “Maybe Argentina, Mexico, something from the east, Japan would be amazing. People come, play some shows and we make some music with them. What would we be great is if they, in turn, could do Drop Shops there.”
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.
In a cover feature he did with Bubblegum Club earlier this year, Felix Laband told us of his desire to push his music forward by making it more topical and confrontational. But sometimes you have to retrace your past steps to go forward. Dropping on the 30th of September, the Bag of Bones EP seems he taking a Janus-faced look at his past and future.
At first, when I saw that the EP has provocative titles like Righteous Red Berets and Donkey Rattle- Kill The Boer I felt a lot of trepidation. There has been a tendency in South Africa for certain white artists to substitute racist stereotypes about African and post-colonial dysfunction for valid critiques of the present ( serial offenders include the writer Rian Malan and artist Anton Kannemeyer). But while Laband’s accompanying EP notes acknowledge that South Africa is undergoing an unsettling period of change, he is coming from a more interesting space than boilerplate white panic ‘ the record speaks of hope, anger, love and dreams.’ Berets in fact draws its inspiration from beyond South Africa. The epic track is built around an emotive vocal sample of the great America murder ballad Stakerlee, which rests on a soft bed of warm synthesiser swells. It sounds positively elegiac, like a gospel song contoured for 2016. But the vocals become even more unsettling, as samples of contemporary South African racism mix with dialogue about notorious cult leader and mass murderer Jim Jones. As with the horror movie lifts on his last album Deaf Safari, he combs the archive to mix horror and beauty. This extends to his own past , with a remix of his most famous song Donkey Rattle modified to revolve around a sample of political action in 1960 Soweto.
Amidst all the political background , the EP’s most satisfying song is it’s intimate title track. Bag of Bones is a warm collaboration with Shane Cooper of Cards on Spokes fame. Putting aside tension and conflict, it has a lovely pastoral feel. Overall, this is another great release by one of SA’s most consistently introducing producers which leaves you wanting more.
A few months before Felix Laband dropped his much anticipated Deaf Safari (2015) album, he played an early evening set at the 2014 Sonar Festival in Cape Town. The venue was packed as one of South Africa’s undisputed electronic masters showcased his latest work. The performance was accompanied with his collage artwork, which mixed up images of porn, politicians and eerie car drives through the depopulated urban fringe. The combination of the subtle music and jagged imagery was at once alluring and disturbing. And it contrasted sharply with the other acts that night. At one extreme were various bro-step EDM acts, trying to disguise their unimaginative beats with gaudy masks and blinding light shows. On the other end were ambient producers, whose wholesome soundscapes seemed clinically designed to induce sleep. Mindless hedonism vs self-indulgent introspection. The guiding aspirations to make a background soundtrack to take different drugs to, rather than any kind of engagement with the wider world. This lack of content was especially glaring because of the setting. Under the roof the Apartheid-era Good Hope Centre, a brutalist block of concrete in the centre of one of the world’s most socially unequal societies.
By combining personal obsessions with the tabloid visuals, Laband’s work came for an entirely different stream of electronic music than the rest of the night’s entertainment. It put him in a lineage of artists who have used synthesisers and samples to make out the dark corners of power, perversity and violence. A twisted family tree which might include post-punk extremists like Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire, confrontational industrial artists Einstürzende Neubauten, Skinny Puppy and Ministry, the insurgent techno collectives of Underground Resistance and Atari Teenage Riot. Currently, artists like Fatima Al-Qardiri and Vatican Shadow soundtrack geopolitical dread. In SA, the theme of revolt is central to Angel Ho’s production, while much of Gqom speaks to a sense of being trapped in an urban maze. Music that speaks of broken bones and riot shields, burning cities, forbidden pleasures.
With his visual collaborator Kerry Chaloner, Felix’s is plunging into this dark water of inspiration. Chaloner is an accomplished painter and visual artist, whose work wrestles with similar topics. As she put it an evocative personal statement for one of her shows ‘I think about learning how to make gunpowder and the alarms of the terrorist drills and not understanding and crawling under our desks. I think about the ash from the next-door hospital incinerators blowing onto our sports day doughnuts.’ They got in touch after Laband was impressed by the ‘bravery and naturalness’ of her video work. As artists they share a fascination with both the darker aspects of life which society tries to sweep under the carpet and the raw power of nature. ‘Our collaborations are about embedding our life in the work. We’re both nerds, big into film and watching wildlife and history documentaries, ’ says Kerry. ‘We’re also both interested in filming things in nature for fun, like playing around with spotlights to make ordinary trees and gardens look suspicious. Then we make mashups of our footage with found footage.. nature-horror-porn.’
Their collaboration coincided with Felix rediscovering his personal interest in visual art. While promoting his last album, he found himself increasingly bored with the limited format of playing for people in nightclubs, and wanted to stage more live striking performances. Having already incorporated his own collages into his show, Kerry’s input allowed him to focus exclusively on the music, while she conducts the visuals. Instead of just pummelling the audience with beats, they are working to create fully textured sonic experiences. Their ultimate goal is to further bridge art and electronic music, with a focus on performing residencies and bringing live vocals into the mix. A key influence for them both is the American avant-gardist Laurie Anderson, whose long career has spanned performance, pop music and film. Felix is planning to upgrade the practical scope of their performances ‘we’re focusing on buying more equipment, making the musical productions more ambitious.’
They don’t just want to make dry conceptual art. Instead they want to say something about what Kerry calls an ‘extremely tense’ global political situation, by looking at the things society would rather repress. The weight of history is something which intrigues them both. Felix’s father is an historian, and growing up in a house surrounded by history books he developed a fascination with how the effects of war and conflict linger on in the present. As an artist, Kerry is conscious of how colonialism and apartheid continue to structure South African life ‘anyone who comes from this middle class, white background must think of how to deal with this history. It subconsciously affects us in so many ways.’ Felix’s interest in the politics of pornography also speaks to this theme of repression, but it’s not without its tensions. ‘We’ve had a lot of fights about it because Kerry comes from a strong feminist perspective and wants to ensure that we always use it in a critical way.’ Kerry argues that ‘I want to make sure that it is not about being salacious or exploitative. It’s more about the politics of what people don’t want to see.’
A further point of convergence is their shared personal histories, as they both grew up in Pietermaritzburg, a small city where the weight of colonial history is especially glaring. ‘Growing up there shapes people artistically’ Felix remembers ‘it has this strange lost colonial outpost feel. But it has produced a lot of really good artists. I haven’t been there in a long time but I’ve been talking with Dave Southwood (photographer) about doing a project about it.’ Kerry also has vivid memories of the gothic strangeness of the KZN midlands ‘Pietermaritzburg was like Twin Peak with more race tension. There was a lot of beauty, trees, parks and mist, but also a real dark side. We both spent many hours as kids and teenagers in the same romantic forests, cemeteries and botanical gardens. There wasn’t much in the way of radical youth culture in Maritzburg… especially pre-internet. If you felt different you had to invent your own.’
Along with excavating the recent path they both have ambitious plans for the future. Kerry is continuing to focus on disruptive paintings and video art. Felix wants to take his next recordings into some unexpected places ‘I’ve always had this dream of recording sounds at World War Two genocide sites in Russia… I wonder does the earth sound different in Babi Yar?’
For the immediate future Felix will be touring the EU at the end of July, and is prepping an EP for release on Compost Records later this year. While other South African electronic artists have their sights fixed on a dimly lit dancefloor, they are keeping their eyes on the ominous skies above.
Felix Laband’s EU tour starts 27 July at Ortigia Sound System (Italy). He we also be performing at Nachtdigital (Germany) Garbicz Festival (Poland) and Mukanda (Italy).
