Jaunted Haunts Press

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Sticky Antlers – Blind Horse Video

Some lo-fi animated fun from Pretoria’s no-fi noiseniks Sticky Antlers.

Blind Horse (animated music video)

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Dual Album Launch Videos pt1

Some videoclips from the recent Newspace Theater performance – firstly from Ramon Galvan’s set – the gorgeous song ‘Salvo’.

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.

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Pics from Righard Kapp and Ramon Galvan album launch

We’ve got some photos from Nic da Silva and his wife Lauren from the Dual Album launch, you can view the full album here.

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Delay in distributing two new albums

Due to an error at the pressing plant there is going to be a slight delay in getting the two new albums distributed into shops, keep watching this space for news on that.

The launch gig was a wonderful experience, thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of that, particularly The Newspace Theatre and Dirk Hugo for doing the sound. I’ll hopefully have photos and comments up soon.

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Two brand new albums out June 21st 2009!

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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.

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‘For Astraea’ in Richard Haslop’s Top 50 albums of 2008

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.

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Limbs Gone Batty: The Buckfever Underground Live Album

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.

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MUTO

This is pretty old, but still easily the most amazing thing ever – a stop motion animation painted on city walls. The artist is known as BLU.

The section inside the factory space (4 minutes in) is especially mindblowing.

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Amazing Dynamic Flash Movies

At times like these I wish i wasn’t a complete moron as far as programming is concerned: these flash applications from Berlin-based developer Andre-Michele are just incredible – the premise of it is that each pixel in the bitmap becomes a seperate particle in a system that is influenced by how the mouse interacts with it. Just click and drag on the logo:

Main thread here

Main thread here

There’s plenty of other amazing stuff on this guy’s site, like physics engines and even a flash based sequencer – go waste hours of your life playing with it here, completely ruining any mystique that that lovely Fridge song ‘Cut Up Piano and Xylophone’ (stream it from here) might have had in the process (i don’t seem to be able to embed that specific application on this site).

As a footnote, i’m getting quite interested in learning some of the more dynamic aspects of Flash, but as i said i am a complete pleb as far as any code or programming is concerned, so if anyone knows of any good resources along the lines of ‘ActionScript For Complete Dummies’, i would be most grateful.

Thanks to Nico van der Watt for the link.

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Benguela Reunion gig

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