It is by now almost a tradition on my side that February is a month that brings many developments and plans to the fore. The most immediate one is the 4th Cape Town instalment of On The Edge of Wrong (the festival also had its first Oslo outing in 2008) , set to take place on the 28th of Feb and 1st of March, again at the Intimate Theatre on Hiddingh Campus. This festival, the initiative of Norwegian guitarist Morten Minothi Kristiansen, aims to present musicians who work at the cutting edge of various disciplines, ranging from jazz to classical to electronic music. Some funding from the Norwegian Jazz Forum and MMINO, a South African-Norwegian Music Exchange body, allows us to present more artists from abroad who are really pushing boundaries. Anyone who witnessed Streifenjunko‘s performance at the 2008 instalment of the festival will testify that the alien sounds the duo conjured out of their horns was a mindfuck of previously unknown proportions.

Clips from their, and other, performances at the festival, shot by Australian electronica artist Andrew Garton, can be viewed here.

The lineup for the 2009 instalment currently looks as follows:

Saturday 28.Feb:

Shane Cooper & Chris Engel

Thundersqueak

Øystein Skar (NO)

“Sonic Duets” feat. Carlo Mombelli & Marcus Wyatt

Sunday 1.March:

Ivan Mazuze, Texito Langa & Gorm Helfjord

The Brydon Bolton Trio

Omenås/Skarbø (NO)

Kyle Shepherd

Tickets are R70 per night (R50 per night for students) OR you can buy a full festival pass for both nights for R120 (R100 for students). Performances will start precisely at 20:00 (please note that the doors will be closed once the performances have commenced) – doors open at 19:00, and there is a cash bar and a lovely outside area to socialize at the Intimate Theatre.

On the label side of things, the major development is that I am currently looking at an April/May launch of my album, and also that Ramon Galvan, who features prominently on it, is also busy wrapping up his own, and that we are looking at launching the two albums simultaneously as well as doing a series of concurrent gigs to promote them.

Ramon Galvan- No Rest

The Buckfever Underground live album, “Limbs Gone Batty: The Role of the Anterior-Posterior Patterning Signal, Sonic Hedgehog, in the Development of the Unique Bat Limb” will also become available during the course of February. The album, which takes its strange title from bassist Gil’s sister Dorit Hockman’s master’s thesis, was recorded at the Independent Armchair Theatre in May 2007, at a gig in which the band’s usually incongruent meanderings gelled into unusually apposite songforms: ‘Letter to the Lonely One’ finds Toast Coetzer’s faltering singing echo Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and builds to an almost orchestral climax (inasmuch as one guitar, bass and drums can be said to approximate ‘orchestral’), while ‘The Curator’ follows a love-as-cannibalism metaphor along a snakelike motif into an eventual feedback morass.
At this point it should also be announced that i have left The Buckfever Underground, owing to other commitments, but that i hope to still work with Toast’s magnificent lyrics in other projects.

The Buckfever Underground – I’ve Joined Facebook, Now What?

Another major development is that i am working in conjunction with Paul Riekert of the One F label, JHB gallerist Warren Siebrits and Marcel Van Heerden, at the previously much hinted at CD reissue of the band KOOS’ 1989 self-titled cassette album. Truly a landmark South African album in my opinion, KOOS were as politicised as many of their peers, but were the only band to really convey the turbulence of those times sonically: as Marcel recalls today, they were making music like what they had imagined punk to sound like. The reissue will be launched at Warren Siebrits’ gallery in Johannesburg on the 18th of March.

KOOS: (l-r) Kendell Geers, Neil Goedhals, Megan Kruskal, Marcel Van Heerden, Gys De Villiers, Velile Nxazonke. Photo by Wayne Oosthuizen

KOOS – Sloper

And then, as promised, here is an mp3 of Ella Joyce Buckley’s great new track ‘Terroir Knot’, for the upcoming Babel Gyve album.

Ella Joyce Buckley -Terroir Knot

Much to take in!

I’m having a little print show at Hello Again, a friend’s second hand clothes shop (44 Bloem Street, next to Jardine) , over the December holidays, for anyone who’s interested/ in the area.

“A miniature exhibition of silkscreened gig posters amassed over three years of wrestling with this fickle but fantastic medium – affable and affordable pseudo-art that also traces a musical path through a variety of great acts like The Wild Eyes, The Real Estate Agents and kidofdoom to rare events like Pan African Space Station and On the Edge of Wrong.

These prints have been on show at Oppikoppi, published in Design Indaba magazine and even made the trip to Flatstock in Austin, Texas, and are now finally on show in Cape Town.”

The prints wil be up from Wednesday the 3rd of December up until the 16th of January. Pop in!

And if you’re interested in where the name comes from, go here.

…at Michaelis (UCT Fine Art Department)’s sublimely equipped printmaking department, getting things together for the second edition of “For Astraea”.

It has been my honour recently to be commisioned by Ntone Edjabe, editor of the Chimurenga literary magazine, to design five posters for a series of gigs that ran as part of the Pan African Space Station “30-day music intervention” he set up with Neo Muyanga.

Among the shows I got to see was a beautifully intimate solo show by Madala Kunene (he played in The Slave Church in Long Str, in complete darkness),a welcome Cape Town performance by the ever-brilliant Blk Jks at The Assembly, and a totally jaw-dropping show by Carlo Mombelli & The Prisoners of Strange at the Mowbray Town Hall.

I’ve seen Carlo Mombelli play solo before, at the first On The Edge of Wrong festival, but nothing could prepare me for the absolute brilliance of the full band’s set. The band, which consists of Marcus Wyatt (trumpet), Siyavuya Makuzeni (voice and trombone) and Lloyd Martin (drums), went from introspective soundscapes into full blown ecstatic free-jazz blowouts which had the crowd rocking in their seats and laughing with sheer joy, and for the first time i saw how such challenging music  can also be so much fun to experience live.

Carlo Mombelli & The Prisoners of Strange @ Mowbray Town Hall, 4 Oct 2008

At one point Carlo distributes a collection of cheap toys to his band, and they launch into ‘Animation’, a complex and ridiculously enjoyable call-and-response loop consisting of whistles, squeaks and wails from the toys.

The Prisoners of Strange played for at least two hours straight, but there was so much to absorb and so much sheer mirth coming from the music that i never once felt bored; only, at one point, a bit worried that my head might explode.

Cape Town certainly gets a raw deal by seeing this incredible band so rarely, but there’s talk of Carlo returning for next year’s ‘Edge of Wrong’, with his band in tow…

On the whole, the Pan African Space Station gigs were brilliantly curated, with an interesting agenda of contextualising artists from other African countries within the rest of the world, such as New York-based drummer Cindy Blackman’s quartet  and Paris-based Bibi Tanga’s Professeur Inlassable, but I get a sense of gleeful vindication from the fact that the most mindblowing shows came from three criminally underrated South African acts.