Some pics by Niklas Zimmer, also featuring the stunning Theatre in the District, visuals by Imagemaster Blink and jellyfish by Zara-Moon Arthur, whose images also adorn the album cover.

More here

As my cursed luck would have it, i’m away for the entire time they’re here, but you can catch them at any one of the following gigs:

Fri 25 Sept @ EVOL
Wed 30 Sept @ Assembly (with Eat This, Horse)
Fri 2 Oct @ EVOL
Sat 3 Oct @ Corner Bar (Durbanville)

I should also mention that the Sticky Antlers’ KRNGY logo have offered a fine new album from Mfeka Mahlangu’s ‘Immaculate Afterbirth’ project entitled ‘Fruhjahrslorchel’ for download – the first few tracks of which consist of haunting drones peppered with ominous percussion, before the beautifully atmospheric 18 minute title track provides some solace. Check the album out here:

Immaculate Afterbirth – “Fruhjahrslorchel”

The highlight of Ramon’s set was the closer ‘No Rest’, which featured an amazing free drumming performance by Ross Campbell and generally much noise.

Thanks to Jaco Minnaar for filming – I will upload more videos early next week.

_______________________________

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.

Brydon Bolton of Benguela circa 2004

Last night, being the first of April of 2009, brought another instance of what a friend of mine jokingly dubbed the ‘Springbok Nude Girls syndrome’; ie the recent tendency of South African bands who had already split up, to play reunion gigs. As an aside, i suspect this is happening for the simple reason that perhaps audiences have become more receptive to what said bands have been doing in the past, and by reuniting now these bands can bask in a popular acceptance they might have been denied previously. For all the lamentations of stagnating creativity that such a phenomenon might bring, what this does demonstrate to me is that there are shifts happening the perceptions of South African audiences. Which is by all means a good thing.

Of course, the reunion gig of the amazing improvising trio Benguela is no mere rehashing of old material, so to call this an example of that syndrome would be short-sighted in the extreme. If anything, it was gratifying to see this group, who had the profoundest impact  on me personally when they were going about 5-6 years ago, perform again. After several years of musical development outside of the group, it was interesting to see whether Ross Campbell, Brydon Bolton and Alex Bozas would find their common ground on stage. The first track they played displayed a certain trepidation, which nevertheless translated as a beautifully atmospheric piece. It didn’t take long for the trio to reestablish the chemistry, however, and before long the band were dazzling in their intensity and inventiveness, particularly in a mindblowing piece in the middle of the set, which put any notion of Benguela being an ‘ambient’ band to rest.

I sincerely hope there are more of Benguela’s gigs to come; if the adage about The Velvet Underground, which said that ‘everyone who saw them started a band’ ever rang true about a South African outfit, it would be them. Well, in my experience at least.

Mp3′s from Benguela available here

Later that evening, the heat inside the small Intimate Theatre inspired the Norwegian Omenås/Skarbø duo to opt to play their set outside, in the parking lot – which turned out to be apt setting for their oddball collection of jerrybuilt percussive devices, xylophones, trumpets and melodica’s.

The Swiss/Turkish vocalist Saadet Turkoz was a last minute addition to the bill, and her performance with Carlo Mombelli and Marcus Wyatt left the whole audience stunned. Here is extract number 1:

And part 2:

This is an extract from the noise trio Thundersqueak’s performance.

I’m not going to say much more, but i’ll upload some more videos during the course of the week. Thanks also to Jaco Minnaar who filmed the performances.

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!

The Buckfever Underground Live The Independent Armchair Theatre, May 2007. Photo by Sam Reinders. This is the gig that was recorded and will soon surface as the live album 'Limbs Gone Batty'

I’ve Joined Facebook, Now What?