The new release, by Ampersand, is entitled Demonomania, and is an EP of material he recorded in London when he was there.

Ampersand – Up Against the Sun

Then we are releasing a  new CD edition of his overlooked gem ‘This is Not a Drill’ – a collection of  lo-est-of-fi acoustic fuzz that is  by turns haunting and hilarious, but consistently, alarmingly brilliant. ‘Twelve’ also features the best use of a tuba/drum machine ensemble i’ve yet heard in this country

Ampersand – (to everyone)

The other reissue is of Givan Lötz’s  ‘Easy Now’, remastered and repackaged. I’ve drooled all over this album so many times and in so many ways, that all that’s really left to say is: LISTEN TO THIS.

Givan Lötz – Soon

The CD”s will be released on CD-R format in smaller editions (150) but in the same silkscreened sleeve you’ve come to expect. You can pre-order the CD’s now from the online store, and the mp3′s will be available from the release date.

We will be doing a mini-tour of the north to celebrate this triple-release. You can check the FB event here. Dates at this stage are as follows:

Thurs 4 Nov: HOWL @ Wolves Cafe, 3 Corlett Drive, Illovo JHB – starting time 20:30, free entry with a donation at your discretion.

Fri 5 Nov: 4de Laan Teaterhuis, 109 4th Ave, Mellville, JHB: An intimate house concert courtesy if the inimitable Trouvrou: Starting time 20:00, tickets R70, or R100 with dinner.

Sat 6 Nov: Flat 4, Clarendon Court, Eastwood Str, PTA: Another house concert – starting time 20:00, tickets R70, or R100 with dinner.
Contact flat4studio@gmail.com for bookings.

Fri 12 Nov: The Bioscope, 286 Fox Str, Maboneng Precinct, JHB – this is the big one we’re building up to, in a fantastic theatre setting with projections. Starting time: 21:00, tickets R60.
Online booking at www.thebioscope.co.za

More dates may well be confirmed yet so watch this space.

I may also add that i will be playing plenty of  new material that i am very excited about.

I have been making noises about a new Ella Joyce Buckley EP as well, although at this stage we have decided to postpone the release in order to re-mix the tracks – rest assured that this is all in the interest of the music sounding as good as it can, and that the new release date will be announced shortly. I can already personally vouch that  Sway Church will be FORMIDABLE.

As a longtime fan of the band, i am proud to announce the release of Benguela’s 4th album, ‘Black Southeaster’, via Jaunted Haunts Press. This is also the band’s first new album since 2004′s SUI, coming after an extended hiatus and the improvisational trio’s return to Cape town’s live circuit in 2009. ‘Black Southeaster’ was recorded in a day at the sadly defunct SUI Studios, and then trimmed down with edits and fleshed out again with overdubs.

Black Southeaster launches on Fri the 23rd of July at the Theatre in the District, District 6, after which Benguela embark on an SA tour.

Benguela ‘Black Southeaster’ tour dates:

Fri 23 July:  Album launch at Theater in the District,  District6  (feat Imagemaster Blink & Righard Kapp)

Thurs 29 July:  Tings&Times, Pretoria (feat.Joao Orecchia)

Fri 30 July: The Bioscope,  JHB (feat Joao Orecchia)

Sat 31 July: George Hotel, Eshowe, KZN

Sun 1st Aug: NSA Gallery, DBN (afternoon show)

Sun 1st Aug: Highfield House, DBN (evening)

Wed 4th Aug: Chandlers Underground, East London

Thurs 5 Aug: Beethoven Room, Rhodes,  Grahamstown

Fri 6 Aug:  The Chaplin @ Uptown Theater, PE

Sat 7 Aug: Potter’s Place, Jeffrey’s Bay

Tues 24 Aug: Die Boer, Durbanville

Thurs 2 sept: Speedway 105, Gardens, Cape Town (feat. Righard Kapp)

Dates and venues may still need to be confirmed but i will update these regularly.

Track Previews:

Black Southeaster sample

Killer Frog Fungus sample

Meridian sample

Neap sample

New digital and physical distribution channels will be finalised as the launch approaches, but the best way to procure a copy will still be to catch one of these rare gigs.

_______________________________

It can finally be announced: on June the 21st, this press is issuing two new albums simultaneously. Ramon Galvan’s ‘Outer Tumbolia’ and Righard Kapp’s ‘Strung Like A Compound Eye’ are launched on this night at the Newspace Theatre in Long Street, Cape Town. You might want to check out these sample tracks before moving on to read the rest of this press release:

Righard Kapp – Strung Like A Compound Eye

Ramon Galvan – Trying to Tell (Summer House)

back, l-r: Ramon Galvan, Righard Kapp (musicians),front, l-r: Jemima, Ben (cats) photograph by Lauren Fowler

Ramon Galvan is the former vocalist and keyboard player from the avant-rock band blackmilk. He is a self taught guitarist, and uses a similarly experimental approach to other instruments – allowing his unfamiliarity with them to guide his approach to songwriting.

An intimate and delicate blend of arcane folk and bludgeoning menace, these are songs about a future that never arrived, a summer that ended, everyday worries and life long puzzles.Written mostly on guitar, the music is peppered with an array of collected instruments, field recordings and found objects.

His debut solo album, ‘Outer Tumbolia’ maps out a clear emotional geography of loss, longing and acceptance, which is both nostalgic and utopian. It features an incendiary collaboration with Benguela drummer Ross Campbell on its dramatic closer as well as a woozy guitar-loop based melding with Jaunted Haunts label boss and close co-conspirator Righard Kapp.

Live, the Galvan Trio is completed by Pierre Du Plessis on electric guitar and trumpet and Nic Dasilva on bass guitar and music box. Ramon Galvan plays electric guitar, kalimba and autoharp.

Ramon is an admirer of Kate Bush, Scott Walker, Nico and Talk Talk.

Tracklist:

1) Luft
2) Trying to Tell (Summer House)
3) Chang, You
4) Luminarc
5) This is how
6) I Will rise Up
7) Grade by Grade
8 ) You Flossed the Stars
9) The Rupture
10) No Rest

Righard Kapp has dwelled on the outskirts of the South African music scene for several years now: from his own ambient and noise experiments to his involvement with the ‘On the Edge of Wrong’ festival of improvised music to his sporadic tenure with literary oddballs The Buckfever Underground, not to mention his label’s activities of releasing albums by decidedly individualistic artists and his involvement in the recent reissue of the 80’s South African art-punk band KOOS, it is clear that the idiosyncratic guitarist values a critical and aesthetic discourse that is well removed from the mainstream.

“Strung Like A Compound Eye” is his first formal foray into the territory of acoustic guitar composition. Although his experimental leanings can’t help but creep in, they do so in a manner that is viscerally appealing and immediate. Kapp aims to channel his fringe syntax into something that makes sense to the most casual of listeners: a dillettante’s one minute trolley dash through these outskirts of musical expression he calls home.

Ultimately, “Strung Like a Compound Eye” is an argument for the broadening of aesthetic horizons in a time when variety, though technologically feasible, is remarkably absent from our prescribed media diets, and in a country that is falling over its own feet in order to come to terms with its own diverse cultural identity.

The album, engineered, co-produced and mixed by Dirk Hugo, features performances by Ramon Galvan, former KOOS frontman Marcel Van Heerden, The Buckfever Underground frontman Toast Coetzer, Lee Thompson and Christopher Engel of the jazz outfit Restless Natives, Benguela drummer Ross Campbell, The Wild Eyes bassist Gareth Dawson and Ella Joyce Buckley, among several others.

Tracklist:

1. August
2. Strung Like A Compound Eye
3. I’m Gonna Learn To Love Myself
4. Static Recollection 1
5. A Monument to Works
6. The Wedding Song
7. Bring Die Bande Nader
8. ‘n Dun Laken Vernuf
9. Static Recollection 2
10. Little Spies
11. Take Me Under your Wing For the Entire Holiday

The main launch gig takes place on Sunday the 21st of June at Newspace One, in Long Street in Cape Town, which will feaure performances by the Ramon Galvan Trio and Righard Kapp’s full live band consisting of Ramon Galvan (vocals, toys), Ross Campbell (drums), Pierre du Plessis (guitar), and Gareth Dawson (bass).

In order to facilitate seating reservations, we have set up a basic reservation system here. As seats are limited we recommend you book in advance.

The ticket price for the launch gigs are R40.A ticket with one of the albums will set you back R100, and a ticket with both albums will cost R150.

The sage-like South African music writer and former host of the ‘Roots to Fruits’ radio show, Richard Haslop, has announced his top 50 albums for 2008, and Ella Joyce Buckley’s ‘For Astraea’ is on it. Also, along with Jim Neversink’s ‘Shakey is Good’, it’s the only South African album on the list.

The list will be published in the June/July issues of Audio Video Magazine, but the entry on ‘For Astraea’ can be viewed here in the meantime.

Congratulations to Ella, and Jim for that matter.

For the sake of online sales, i’ve registered with the south african pay site SETCOM, which will hopefully prove to be a useful step towards gearing this site for convenient online sales. My shop section can be accessed here, needless to say i will be working toward making online sales as convenient and self-explanatory as possible. Please don’t hesitate to offer any suggestions in this regard.

My apologies for scant and slightly off-topic posting of late. No excuses, barring not having much to say.

It’s taken a bit longer than it should have, but i can finally announce that  the Buckfever Underground live album ‘Limbs Gone Batty’ is now available. Recorded one fine May night at the much missed Independent Armchair Theatre, it’s probably one of the most focused gigs we’ve had in terms of our meandering improvisations coalescing into something approaching recognizable songforms. The album is pressed up in a silkscreened sleeve in an edition of 250. Also, have a free mp3 of ‘The Curator’ on us: i personally think that being dismembered by your lover has never sounded this sexy.

Tracklisting:

1. Letter To The Lonely One
2. The Curator
3. The South African
4. I Saw What Warrick Sony Saw
5. I’m On Facebook, Now What?
6. Teen Maandag Is Ons Dood
7. AIDS Test
8. Die Volk Is In Die Kak
9. The Anterior-Posterior Patterning Signal

I may add at this point that i am investigating avenues for efficient and easy online sales through this site, i hope to have everything in place within the next few weeks, however, if you are desperate for a copy NOW, contact me and we can make an arrangement.

This coming Wednesday, the 18th of March, sees the sole album from legendary South African post-punk band KOOS reissued for the first time on CD, or any format since the album’s limited edition cassette release in 1989.

“Forget about Johannes Kerkorrel and his buddies, KOOS were the truly innovative band whose music defined and reflected South Africa’s increasingly dark eighties. The band was formed in 1986 by conceptual artist Neil Goedhals and actor Marcel Van Heerden, who were joined by Gys de Villiers, Megan Kruskal, Velile Nxazonke and Kendell Geers. The country’s original punk poet Johan van Wyk wrote some of the lyrics.

KOOS was a highly personal reaction to the chaos and despair that had engulfed the country in the mid-eighties. States of emergency, burning townships, murder, bomb attacks and people who “fell from the window” of a police station or “slipped on a piece of soap.” That was the subject matter KOOS sang about in songs like Sing jy van Bomme, Tsafendas and the menacing Die Suid Afrikaanse Herfs, which referenced the German terrorists of the Rote Armee Faktion.

Musically they were miles ahead of the 12 bar blues and folk that had inspired their alternative Afrikaner contemporaries. Their sound was artful anti-rock, fuelled by the noises that had reached Johannesburg from Berlin, Sheffield, Melbourne and Cologne: the metallic motorik and madness of Einstürzende Neubauten, Cabaret Voltaire, Birthday Party and Can, but all done in a unique style that has aged surprisingly well and would now probably be called post-punk. Van Heerden sang, spat and whispered. Sometimes he used pebbles to distort his voice, while Goedhals punished his guitar.

KOOS disbanded in 1990. They had lived through the states of emergency of 1985 and 1986, they had been attacked, their name had partly been appropriated by Andre Letoit who became Koos Kombuis, but they had survived; battered, but unbowed. Then, in 1990, around the time of the release of Nelson Mandela, the group imploded. The country was going through monumental changes. Goedhals didn’t want to perform anymore. There was no big fight, no drama, together they decided to call it a day. The raison d’être was gone. The band had made its statement: that one black tape, wrapped in a brown paper bag to accentuate its illicit content – a nod to the way the American bum must drink his alcohol.

Later that same year, on the 16th of August, on Elvis Presley’s dying-day, Goedhals jumped to his death from the sixth floor of a flat in Yeoville. A few days later came the news that the Johannesburg Art Gallery had bought some of his works. It sounded like a Goedhals prank.

The legend of KOOS wouldn’t rest though. First, Dutch journalist Fred de Vries immortalised them in his well received 80s underground book Club Risiko (Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 2006), where they share pages with international luminaries such as Sonic Youth, Laibach and Einstürzende Neubauten. Second, American underground label, S-S Records, intends to release some of Goedhals’s experimental pre-KOOS recordings later this year.

But most important: here’s the re-mastered version of that legendary collector’s item that Shifty Records released twenty years ago.”

The launch takes place at Warren Siebrits Gallery, 140 Jan Smuts Ave, in Johannesburg.

KOOS – Sloper

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!

Tracklisting:

1. The Majesty of Violet Sky
2. Lotus Lake
3. The Birds
4. Under the Wild whats
5. Parhelion
6. Harlequin Jack
7. Wanderlust

The agenda of the blog is still very much the same – to post mp3′s of interesting music that might pass under the radar otherwise, to update on the activities of the label and related events such as the upoming ‘On The Edge of Wrong’ festival, to post the occasional illustration and screenprint, and to wax lyrical about any amazing album or gig that comes our way.

Jaunted Haunts Press, the record label, originated out of a desire to formalise the output of the cd-r label named (somewhat obtusely, admittedly) \/#/. So we have given it a pronouncable name, and also decided to press CD’s, for distribution purposes.

The first pressing, a second, pressed up edition of Ella Joyce Buckley’s “For Astraea”, is, for all practical purposes, finished, and will be available shortly.

Meanwhile Ella has been working on an amazing new body of work entitled ‘Babel Gyve’, which will be available further down the line. ‘Babel Gyve’ is mostly guitar-based, and can only be described as gritty, atmospheric and heart- rendingly gorgeous. Check out the demo of ‘Mazarine’ for a taster of what’s to come.

Ella Joyce Buckley – ‘Mazarine’ (demo)

The second release, which will see the light during the course of November, is a live album by The Buckfever Underground, entitled ‘Limbs Gone Batty…’, which was recorded at the Independent Armchair Theatre in May 2007, and captures the band in all its shambolic yet inspired glory.

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

A second edition of Ampersand’s ‘This is not a Drill’ is also imminent.

Progress on my own album with Dirk Hugo has been slow but steady, and the cast of collaborators has grown to include Ella Joyce Buckley, Ramon Da Silva, Brydon Bolton, Waldo Alexander, Jeanette Claassen, Martin Jacklin, Toast Coetzer, Gareth Dawson and Mark Van Niekerk.

I’ve been doing rehearsals with my personal favourite drummer ever, Ross Campbell (of Urban Creep, Fetish and Benguela) and we will be going into the studio to record drums next week (which is going to sound incredible and will tie a lot of things together). It is an honour and an absolute joy to work with the musician who is also responsible for the mindblowing drums on this:

Ramon Galvan – “No Rest”

At the moment, the solo acoustic track ‘August’ is still the only track complete enough for a preview, but i can already safely say that there are a few surprises in store. I am presently hoping to release this around April next year.

Righard Kapp – “August”

That is all for now. I solemnly vow to post more frequently, and also to have other contributors post more frequently.

Amen