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LINER NOTESRecorded and Mixed by Dirk Hugo. Thanks to all the collaborators since 2010. All rights reserved © 2018 |
AS IS
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TRACK LISTING
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ARTISTS
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NOTESI thank John Peffer for sending me a copy of this unassuming CD-R with recordings by experimental jazz group As Is. The group here includes Andrea Dicó on percussion, Lliezel Ellick on cello and vocals, Garth Erasmus on blik’nsnaar and saxophones, Niklas Zimmer on percussion and Manfred Zylla on accordion, trombone and vocals. Formed in 2010, the group is made up of a number of collaborators and in July 2016 I was fortunate to see a slightly different configuration of the band perform above the Blah Blah Bar in Cape Town. The venue formed part of Erdmann Contemporary on Kloof Street where some of the performers involved also exhibited. That night I recall the various performers being stationed at different locations in the space, moving and interacting from one room to another. We all, performers and audience, eventually gravitated to a central room taking on our traditional roles of viewers and viewed. At some point someone in the audience, seemingly possessed by the music, began making noises and slid onto the floor. He then slowly crawled through the audience and onto the stage where he located a microphone and began reciting stream-of-consciousness headlines sourced from that days’ news. Something about Hillary’s emails! The vocalist turned out to be film maker, Aryan Kaganof (or ‘Kalashnikov’ as some people I heard refer to him). Recently Kaganof has been the editor of Herri, an online magazine focussing on music and cultural criticism funded by the Africa Open Institute. As Is over the years has collaborated with a number of artists including Kaganof, violist Brendon Bussy and others. In the mid 1990s Bussy was involved with many of the audio adventures at the FLAT Gallery in Durban. For some months prior to the evening, I had been in communication with drummer, Niklas Zimmer and we were finally able to meet at the performance. Zimmer, who by day is the head of the Digital Library services at UCT, kindly invited me to visit their archives the following day. He had also worked as an archivist at the Centre for Popular Memory at UCT where he was an audio specialist and digitisation manager. At the archives we viewed various projects he was involved with including some cylinders that had been recorded by Percival Kirby in the 1930s. Sadly, Garth Erasmus was not performing that night at Blah Blah. I first met Erasmus when we shared a two-person art exhibition, ReSoundings, at the University of Delaware in 2015. His projects included a series of drawings and prints exploring Khoisan history and a display of traditional Khoisan musical instruments. For many years Erasmus has been significantly involved in documenting the cultural heritage of South Africa’s indigenous peoples. For the duration of the exhibition, he installed an eighteen minute looped soundscape named for the Goringhaikona chief, Autshumato, who was imprisoned by the Dutch on Robbin Island in 1659. Listen to Erasmus perform on the blik'nsnaar at YouTube. View Zimmer's recent sound essay in the current issue of Herri. |
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