Initial Post

This is the initial posting on the former ‘Intention Deficit’ blog, dated Nov 2007.

What this is…

Intention Deficit is a blog dedicated mostly to musical activity happening on the margins of the mainstream, aiming to give a voice to artists who pursue intensely personal visions and refuse to pander to prevailing fashions and norms. I am taking my own creative processes as a starting point, but I have approached several friends to contribute regularly as well.

An imminent residency in Switzerland led me to do a lot of housekeeping as far as my own recorded work is concerned – over a space of about 6 years I have amassed a rather broad range of audio documents, most of which I have felt quite ambivalent about at the time, but which, in retrospect, have taken on a certain significance as signposts in a bizarre musical journey.
I am also busy recording what you could probably say is my first proper studio album, which will promise to be an interesting, and at times, unnerving, process. For someone who has taken some pride in refusing to stay put musically and being uncategorizable, the idea of drawing a line under a project, throwing it out there and saying ‘This Is It’ is, to be frank, as scary as hell. This is another reason I have been scouring my own back catalogue, in order to glean some sort of unifying sensibility, and also to get a sense of the different vocabularies that I’d like the album to comprise of. At the core, it is a guitar album, the skeleton of which consists of very simple, I dare even say naïve, songs, although I can promise at this stage that there will definitely be a monster lurking underneath the surface.

The insanely talented Ella Joyce Buckley is also busy recording her first album, which promises to be mindblowing – hopefully we’ll get insights from her into her own creative process and the trials and tribulations of the recording sessions.

The Norwegian improvising guitarist Morten Minothi Kristiansen is at present putting together the third annual ‘On The Edge of Wrong’ festival, scheduled to take place at the Intimate Theatre from the 26th of February to the 2nd of March – the lineup is as yet unconfirmed, but names being bandied about include Louis Moholo and Zim Ngqawanga, so expect great things.

Prominent sound artist James Webb is also putting together an exposition entitled ‘Fear of the Known’, scheduled to take place in the first half of March 2008, spanning three major events in Stellenbosch, Cape Town and Johannesburg respectively.

Another entity this blog will deal with, which has lost considerable momentum owing to useless politics, infighting and the subsequent despondency, is the cd-r label that will henceforth be known as \/#/, as in a drawing of a trolley. This entity bears absolutely no relation to OMTD Records cc, but will pick up where One Minute Trolley Dash left off before some confusion as to purpose and practice led to what could be called an infinitesimal coup d’etat. In retrospect I can honestly say that I am probably the one person who is least equipped to run a record label: in terms of marketing, administration and distribution I doubtlessly fell far short of establishing a sustainable business model. However, I failed at something I never intended to do in the first place, and it is no secret that record labels as we know them are on a rapid one way road to obsolescence.
One lesson I learned from the whole OMTD incident is that you can’t have your bread buttered on both sides, and a positive result is that \/#/ is now free to pursue its original aims with renewed vigour, without needing to pay attention to logistical and sustainability issues. The activity of the label will necessarily be dependent on the availability of resources, and perhaps be quite sporadic as a result, but will be absolutely focused on providing a platform for artists whose approach and vision are simply too unique and oblique for the mainstream music industry, as well as giving ‘you, the consumer’ (puke) more than what you paid for, be it through album packaging that is crafted by hand, or music that simply reaches places that are intangible and impossible to define.
The cd-r label’s inaugural release has already slipped out quietly in August 2007 – Ampersand’s This Is Not A Drill is an extremely lo-fi collection of songs that are, in a word, otherworldly. This release warrants its own post so I won’t elaborate much more here.

Another thing that may feature in this blog from time to time is the activities of The Buckfever Underground, a band I play in, which centres around the magnificent lyrical vision of Toast Coetzer. The album Saves came out in 2007 – it was recorded in 2005, and although I knew it was special at the time, the critical response to the album has been overwhelming. I have an almost worshipful reverence of Toast’s writing, which is honest, unpretentious, incisive, brave, funny yet sad and cynical yet compassionate. The band’s path thus far has not been without bumps, but a commitment to preparing to record a new album in due course promises to lead to interesting things.

Moreover, this blog will be a forum for discussions around significant albums, gigs, musical ideas, and so forth, by friends whose aesthetic instincts I trust completely.

I will also, in a separate subsection of the blog, be posting updates and works in progress, as well as things of interest pertaining to my activities in the field of illustration, animation and screenprinted posters.

The South African music scene is more interesting and exciting than ever, with intelligent artists and bands managing to take the reins of their craft and at times even denting the mainstream. There will always be abject kak littering the airwaves, but, to me, it has become common sense that, culturally speaking, the relevant developments have always happened on the margins, and have invariably been fuelled by personal struggles against obscurity, indifference, and, at certain junctures in history, oppression. At the risk of sounding romantic and transcendentalist (although, what’s wrong with that?), it is struggles like these that produce art that is testimony to human tenacity, resourcefulness, compassion, even.
Consumers (puke) are also freer than ever to choose for themselves what they immerse themselves in, and although Devo were absolutely right in saying that freedom from choice is actually what people want, there will always be people who feel the slightest un-ease about what they’re being fed, and are prepared to venture further afield too see if there is anything more.
This blog, and most of the activity that it deals with, is more interested in process than product, because meaningful art exists in the world, is impacted upon by it, and is necessarily contingent and open-ended as a result.

In closing, I would like to dedicate this blog to the memory of Gerdte Terblanche, who tried to persuade me to do this exact same thing years ago before he passed away tragically in 2005. I salute and miss you.

Righard Kapp