THE LAKE #002 by THE LAKE MAGAZINE

SWITCH NO SUMMER FOR YOU

FREE

THE LAKE

THE LAKE WE ARE FOOLISHLY Ambitious

#2 /151114

no summer for you “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz...” Howl - By Allen Ginsberg 1956

CONTENTS REGULARS:

PUBLISHER

News 04 Print Run 52 Wax Junkie 54 Clobber / M 56 Clobber / F 58 Plimsoll 60 ART: Warren Editions Utopia My war

14 18 39

PHOTOGRAPHY: Stalker Ariel Quick Fix

16 34 48

Editor / Art Direction Stefan Naude’ stefan@thelake.co COVER Nikhil Singh Hayden Phipps $KEET Lise Slabber Studio

Cover Photography Styling / Wardrobe Make up The Ground Floor Studio

photographers

CONTENTS PHOTO

Jacqui Van Staden Hayden Phipps Oliver Kruger Virginia Cummins Grant Payne Jansen van Staden Stan Engelbrecht Adriaan Louw Gabi Lee Nico Krijno

Jansen van Staden www.pee-yu.tumblr.com LIGHTING Lighting equipment sponsored by Sebastian Voigt: Big Time Studios 021 461 2805.

Contributors

MUSIC: Jambalaya Dusted Trailer Trash Heavy Elevator Jazz

THE LAKE MAGAZINE PTY LTD info@thelake.co

08 22 24 50

LIFE: Campeão 10 Simon & Mary 26 Pandora 30 Fromage Et Le Vin 42 Eat Your Shoes 46

Ruan Scott Hein Coetzee Xavier Nagel Rick De La Ray Submissions

MARKETING

Att: Submissions info@thelake.co

Katie Andersz info@thelake.co

Advertising

COPY EDITOR

Brendan Body brendan@thelake.co

Luke Jackson luke@thelake.co

Brett Bellairs brett@thelake.co

video

FASHION

Johan Buekes johan@thelake.co

Kristi Vlok kristi@thelake.co The views and opinions expressed within the editorial and advertisements of THE LAKE do not necessarily reflect those of its staff, nor any of its associates.THE LAKE and anything contained within is copyright. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, copied or stored electronically without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

PRINTING PAARLMEDIA Paarl Media Group Tel: +27 21 550 2500 Email: info@paarlmedia.co.za

THE LAKE

NEWS adidas Originals celebrates Summer with Socks and Slides

FOO FIGHTERS FIRST EVER SOUTH AFRICAN TOUR

Ever since it hit the scene in ‘72, the adidas Originals adilette has been one of the world’s most popular slides. Whether you’re just chilling out or adventuring across environs where only sandals tread, the adilette has always been about comfort and style in every step.

Big Concerts are excited to announce that Foo Fighters have confirmed two stadium dates for December 2014. Go to www.bigconcerts.co.za Cape Town: 10th Dec 2014 at C T Stadium Johannesburg: 13th Dec 2014 at FNB Stadium

This summer, the adilette takes centre stage once again in one of the biggest anti-trends to hit fashion this season: Socks and Slides. Previously seen as a fashion faux pas, the look aims to alter perceptions in true adidas Originals style and is a current favourite among some of the biggest names in fashion. Pairing signature adidas Originals socks with the notorious adilettes has never looked better, and is undoubtedly the “love it or hate it” must-have look of this summer. Adilettes are now available at adidas Originals stores in Canal Walk and V&A Waterfront (Cape Town) and Menlyn Park Shopping Centre (Pretoria) Follow adidas Originals on Instagram adidasZA and on Twitter @adidasZA. Unlock the adidas vault to find out more about the brand’s heritage: Contact: www.adidas-archive.org IMAGE: Kope | Figgins.

Lomography Action 35mm Camera (Clear)

Sampler

The Lomo Action Sampler 4-Lens 35mm Camera is a 4-lensed camera that neatly dissects a second into four parts and then re-assembles them to create something entirely new.dy 2.0 introduces design and form so far ahead of the curve, there’s no point in trying to catch up. With one shot you get a

DIESEL – DZ7314

series of four images on one print & a macro-movie to be relished online! Uses 35mm film: Load the ActionSampler Clear with any 35mm film you like. Now even more robust, ultra-heated and, in its awesome packaging, complete with a camera strap and 2 books on action sampling and Lomography, the ideal gift.

As far as makeovers go, Diesel Timeframes covets the opportunity to make the best even better. Such is the case with Daddy 2.0, a stylistically elevated rendition of the brand’s most celebrated platform. Featuring an intricacy-redefining multi-layer dial, four time zones and a fresh case update, Mr. Daddy 2.0 introduces design and form so far ahead of the curve, there’s no point in trying to catch up.

R390.00 Contact: www.ormsdirect.co.za

Kalahari Surfers - Tropical Barbie Hawaiian Surf Set - Retro Active Works from 1982-1989

Teleport yourself back 30 years ago, in the heart of the apartheid South African conflict and resistance. Times were as tough as a burning tyre, the government was in turmoil and getting fire from all over the world while the different resistance groups's smoke signals are finally seen by the rest of the world. I wasn't even born up until the mid 80s but still this forms part of my and everybody else's history. As tough as it was for South Africans in various positions, as tough it was to make music with a anti political agenda. This is when the Kalahari Surfers started to ride the wave with a surfboard as sharp as a spear.

rick Sony set out to become one of the most influential compositors in cut-and-paste-punk in SA. His album "Bigger than Jesus" was declared "Undesirable" by the government taken from the shelves, a court case which involved a congregation of Priests sitting around a round table listening to the album meticulously with oversized earphones. As crazy as it my seem, I even heard rumors of people buying the record at record stores and smashing it to pieces right outside the store. The Kalahari Surfers were than forced to change the title to "Beachbomb", there is still some albums out there that survived the defacing.

Armed with a tape-loop-machine, bass guitar and and handful of different musician contributors War-

I met up with Warrick Sony and after about roughly 30 meetings, ironically the same amount of years

THE LAKE

back in the past when the music was made, we compiled a full length 12inch vinyl with some of the most prominent material from the Surfer's first period. I also documented all his original hand made collages and this forms the basis for the visual experience of the "Tropical Barbie Hawaiian Surf Set". This retro active material is a crucial part of South African history and culture and will never be forgotten. Angry Africa Records and Roastin' Records are proud to release something with such rich historical significance and hope to spread it as wide as the possible. Art Direction by Hein Coetzee Cover Collage by Warrick Sony Retro Active Works Compiled by Warrick Sony

THE LAKE

NEWS 13th Floor Elevators Live Evolution Lost 2014 - Charly Records

COLORED 3LP BOX SET / R1000 Psychedelic pioneers the 13th Floor Elevators had a sterling reputation as a live act during their years in Austin, Texas, but there are only a few scraps of recorded evidence to back up the legend of the Elevators’ fiery shows. Tapes exist of early radio and television performances by the band, and an oft-bootlegged 1966 show at San Francisco’s Avalon Ballroom captured them at the height of their powers, but the Elevators’ lone attempt at a live album was well short of a success. International Artists Records arranged for a remote crew to record the group’s February 18, 1967 show at the Houston Music Theater, but as was their habit, most of the bandmembers dropped acid before the gig so they would be tripping once they hit the stage; the LSD was more powerful than expected, and guitarist Stacy Sutherland suffered a very bad trip.

As he described it in an interview, Sutherland imagined “All of a sudden, here was a vision in light that we were wolves and we were spreading drugs and Satanism into the world and I never realized it because of an Antichrist influence...I couldn’t talk to Tommy (Hall) or Roky (Erickson) that night, see, because they were the wolves. I was a wolf, too.” As you might expect, the opening number, “(I’ve Got) Levitation,” was a shambles, as were several other tunes that evening, and while the bandmembers found their footing later that night, the show was a severe disappointment and IA shelved the tapes. Live Evolution Lost marks the first authorized release of the complete Houston Music Theater recordings, and ultimately the show is better than its reputation, but only by so much. Sutherland wasn’t the only performer having trouble that night, as Roky Erickson often either forgets vocals or neglects to sing into the mike, and the chemical troubles and uncomfortable vibe of the large venue seem to throw the Elevators off their stride, as this show lacks the taut energy and keen focus of the Avalon Ballroom tapes.

Contact: www.thelisteningroom.co.za

FAMKE

Culture urban + contemporary

The blood sweat and tears of Cape Town based designer, entrepreneur and jewellery manufacturer Famke Koene, is no longer a brand to watch out for. Sold out shows across South Africa both online and at festivals have elevated her from Cape Town’s ‘best kept secret’ to an absolute fashion necessity.

Culture urban+contemporary Gallery at The Woodstock Exchange aims to introduce a local art public to recent international artists, which include Young British Artists (YBA’s) such as Jake & Dinos Chapman and Tracey Emin, US artist Shepard Fairey, as well as exhibit local artists such as Mariette Bergh, Shirley Fintz and Gordon Radowsky.

Famke Koene:“ I am inspired and strive to create things that are never-ending and last forever. Objects to create and celebrate never-ending relationships and bonds between people. Bones, stripped raw by the sun... its like they never give up on life, they remain, even after the body and soul has left. I celebrate that strength, that tenacity and persistence and design objects for relationships that strive to (live forever) do the same. My geo shapes are designed to say that it doesn’t matter how odd, irregular, unpolished, imperfect you are, because YOU ARE PERFECT! That is where the integrity comes in, from the honesty and the acceptance of the history of who we are and where we come from.”

Culture Gallery concentrates on high quality limited edition works on paper in order to keep prices attractive to local art lovers, although their collection includes one-off original works, ceramics, sculptures and mixed media. In association with World Design Capital, Culture Gallery and The Dog’s Bollocks at The Yard are currently developing Cape Town’s first ever 'Art Street' (#WDC354), which will run as an open-air gallery. Some of the artists featured include Ninjabreadboy, Anja Venter, Jade Klara, Atang Tshikare and Dylan Culhane.

Contact: www.famke.co.za

Contact: www.culturegallery.co.za

The Erotic Drawings of Anton Kannemeyer The Erotic Drawings of Anton Kannemeyer (STEVENSON) is a limited edition hard cover collection of Joe Dog’s “erotic” pictures. With an essay by Antjie Krog, this R480 collectable is ideal for anyone interested in Bitterkomix or South African (erotic) Art.

express himself both literarily and visually, with his intimate knowledge of oppressive cultures, his neurotic gaze and legendary stamina, Kannemeyer remains dangerous and lethal. One moves into these pages at ones’ own peril!” Contact: www.bibliophilia.co.za

As Ashraf Jamal wrote in a recent Business Day review “An Afrikaner schooled in hatred and oppression, Kannemeyer’s role has been to reflect upon the damage inflicted by his colonial and apartheid history. However, merely to see him as a critic of a corrosive legacy is also to miss the mark, for Kannemeyer’s jaundiced eye is as excoriatingly trained on the current moment wherein democracy is a mere illusion, rape and rapine prevail, and the horrors, now racially inverted, continue to mock the dream of an ethical, bio-political transubstantiation.” Work dating back to 1995 is included and although some work has been seen before there’s also enough “new” material to make the pulse race and the eyes dilate! In her introductory essay Antjie Krog writes about Kannemeyer’s “capacity to 06

THE LAKE

Adidas Busenitz Vulc Skate Shoes The Busenitz vulc skate shoes from Adidas are vulcanized versions of the original Busenitz that treat the popular skate shoe to a technical upgrade. Featuring a smooth all-suede upper, a comfortable molded sockliner, supportive GEOFIT collar cushioning, and the Vector Traction outsole for the ultimate in traction protection. Adidas has further improved this shoe by increasing the durometer of the rubber sole. The result is the same sleek design with a harder outsole for long days of pushing through the streets.

THE LAKE

Jambalaya Heino Retief / GUMBO YA-YA’S QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - HAYDEN PHIPPS

“There’s only one way to record rock n roll, and that is ‘live and raw’. This way, you capture more of the feeling, even if there are small mistakes here and there. We recorded the whole album in the waiting room of Johnny’s voice-over studio.” WHAT LEAD TO THE BIRTH OF THE GUMBOS? IT SEEMS YOU WASTED NO TIME AFTER THE FUTURE PRIMITIVES DECIDED TO CALL IT A DAY? The Gumbo Ya-Ya’s was an idea for a very long time, even before The Future Primitives was there. I just let it take the backseat as I wasn’t really sure what to do with it, I really just felt like writing songs and the thought of a side project really seemed cool. When The Future Primitives decided to stop playing, it gave me all the more reason to pursue this idea. Warren and I both wanted to stay solid, so we started jamming some of the ideas in early January. In two months, I completed all the songs and then started looking for a guitarist. THE FUTURE PRIMITIVES RELEASED THREE ALBUMS ON VARIOUS INTERNATIONAL INDIE LABELS – WHAT LEAD TO THE DISBANDING OF THE GROUP? The Future Primitives had a good run and after coming from nothing and doing so much with the band, it felt like the right time to move on. Business-wise, we weren’t allowed to release our last album until the label put it out, making it feel like a drag towards the end. When the album finally got released, it sadly didn’t mean as much as it did when we finished recording it six months earlier. It was like six months of purgatory. Recording the albums, playing shows and touring with Johnny and Warren will be what I cherish the most, whereas releasing and dealing with labels just started feeling like business at the end of the day. And where’s the fun in that? YOU GUYS BASICALLY LAUNCHED THE BAND AND THE 1ST ALBUM ‘SUPERSTITIOUS KISSES’ AT THE SAME TIME, IN JUNE THIS YEAR. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO GO THIS ROUTE INSTEAD OF TESTING THE WATERS A BIT WITH A FEW SHOWS? There were no waters to be tested. I wrote the album before we had a guitarist on board, so I knew from the start what I wanted to do. It was all a matter of pushing myself to actually do it. We recorded at the end of May and played our first show the following Sunday, 8 June. THE FIRST ALBUM IS AVAILABLE AS A FREE DOWNLOAD ON BANDCAMP. WHY DID YOU DECIDE TO RELEASE IT FOR FREE AND HAS THERE BEEN ANY INTERESTS FROM PREVIOUS LABELS THAT RELEASED THE PRIMITIVES’ MUSIC? I wanted to get the album out as soon as possible in order to introduce the band. A free download makes it more accessible for people who simply want to check it out and I also don’t see the point in paying for a digital release if there isn’t a physical copy available. I’d always opt for the physical release. Interest from labels is one thing but your album getting pressed is another. Independent labels need to make album sales to survive, that’s why they need their bands to tour the albums that they release. As a band on the tip of Africa, with little to no money for touring, things haven’t really counted in our favour yet.

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE ON THE SINGING DUTIES IN THE BAND THIS TIME, DID YOU HAVE MUCH EXPERIENCE BEFORE OR DID YOU JUST DECIDE TO CHUCK YOURSELF IN AT THE DEEP END?

I wanted to start a band, so she suggested we jam together. To be honest, I didn’t even know he skated until way later. It didn’t really matter to me because he could play some cool guitar.

SONAL INTEREST IN THE TYPE OF MUSIC YOU GUYS ARE PLAYING AND WHERE WOULD YOU FEEL THE HEART OF THE BAND LIES IN TERMS OF WHAT OTHER GROUPS ARE DOING ABROAD?

Other than doing some backing vocals for The Future Primitives, I have no experience in singing. I wrote all the Gumbo’s songs with the intention of singing them, even though I wasn’t really sure of how it would come out. But, you’ll never know if you don’t try it out, so I just went for it.

ARE YOU CONSIDERING TOURING A LOT MORE WITH THE BAND LOCALLY, MORE SO THAN THE PRIMITIVES DID? BANDS LIKE ‘MAKE OVERS’ FROM PRETORIA HAVE BEEN VERY ACTIVE IN THAT SENSE AND ALSO INTERNATIONALLY, MAKING QUITE A NAME IN THE AMERICAN GARAGE SCENE?

ALL YOU GUYS SEEM TO BE PRETTY TIGHT WITH SUPPORTING EACH OTHER’S MUSICAL PROJECTS, WITH JOHNNY TEX STILL BEING INVOLVED WITH THE RECORDING PROCESS AND WARREN STILL DRUMMING FOR BOTH THE GUMBO’S AND JOHNNY’S NEW PROJECT CALLED ‘THE DYNA JETS’?

Yeah, The Future Primitives never toured South Africa. We only really got an opportunity to go to Europe and pretty much worked towards that. I really want to make The Gumbo Ya-Ya’s mission up-country soon. Even though the places to play are few and far between, the whole aesthetic of going on tour and playing to strangers in unfamiliar places does seem very attractive.

When Johnny and I started jamming together a good 5 or 6 years ago, he introduced me to garage, like The Black Lips. I really loved what they were doing at the time, and still go back to those early days whenever I reference them. They drew influence from a ton of old bands that I’ve also grown fond of over the years. I’ve delved into garage and always seem to dig up something I’m not familiar with, and even though the garage heyday lasted less than two years in the 60s, the amount of bands and impact it had on music is phenomenal. I mean, punk wouldn’t have seen the light of day if it wasn’t for bands like The Wailers or The Sonics and even lesser-known, some even still undiscovered, bands from the time that only got to record a song or two before disappearing into obscurity. Lately, new garage bands tend to go more grunge, which I don’t really dig that much. Bands that make cool garage nowadays include: The Baron Four (with members from Thee Vicars) from the UK, The Frowning Clouds from Australia, Dead Ghosts from Canada and a few bands from the thriving French scene, such as Strange Hands, Dusty Mush and Os Noctàmbulos. I’d put The Reatards and early Ty Segall on the list as well, but Jay is gone and Ty lost it.

Of course we’re tight. Johnny is the person who introduced me to garage in the first place, so I owe a lot to him. We go way back, we’ve started two bands together, we’re pretty much brothers. And who on earth can’t love the fluff that is Warren? We’ve seen and experienced a lot together, and I honestly wouldn’t trade that for anything. SPEAKING OF THE RECORDING PROCESS – WHAT MADE YOU GUYS DECIDE TO RECORD THE ALBUM ON AN OLD 8 TRACK REEL-TO-REEL RECORDING MACHINE? WERE THERE ANY DIFFICULTIES INVOLVED IN CONVERTING IT TO DIGITAL AFTERWARDS? I like the sound that we got from recording to tape with The Future Primitives. Johnny accumulated all this really cool analogue recording gear since The Revelators days, so when given the option between digital and tape, I’d obviously rather go for tape. Him and Warren also seem to have the whole process down. In a way it’s nostalgic. But it’s also very ‘right now’ and real, like “okay, we’re rolling, let’s slam a track to tape!” I can’t say much for converting to digital, you’d have to ask the protool engineer. HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT THE RECORDING PROCESS, WAS IT JUST A STRAIGHT FORWARD LIVE AND RAW APPROACH OR DID YOU RECORD CERTAIN SECTIONS SEPARATELY AND MIX IT LATER? There’s only one way to record rock n roll, and that is ‘live and raw’. This way, you capture more of the feeling, even if there are small mistakes here and there. We recorded the whole album on 31 May in the waiting room of Johnny’s voice-over studio. HOW DID GIOVANNI VOTANO BECOME INVOLVED IN THE BAND, HE IS QUITE WELL KNOWN IN THE SKATEBOARDING COMMUNITY AND GRACED THE COVER OF SESSION MAGAZINE AROUND ABOUT THE SAME TIME THAT THE BAND PLAYED THEIR FIRST LIVE SHOW. I THINK A LOT OF PEOPLE WEREN’T AWARE THAT HE COULD EVEN PLAY GUITAR?

ARE YOU GUYS BUSY WITH A SECOND ALBUM AT THE MOMENT AND WILL YOU CONTINUE TO RELEASE YOUR MUSIC FOR FREE OR WILL YOU GO A DIFFERENT ROUTE WITH THE SECOND ONE? We’ve been playing a lot of new material live, so maybe we’ll record that sometime soon. I keep writing regardless of prospects for a new album, there is no rush in releasing anyway. Some songs I write aren’t even meant for The Gumbo Ya-Ya’s. I’d love to release something on wax, although we have a ‘Superstitious Kisses’ cassette coming out on a new French label in the near future, called Dirty Slice.

The Gumbo Ya-Ya’s - FREE DOWNLOAD Superstitious Kisses 2014 - Bandcamp

ARE YOU BUSY WITH OR PLANNING ANY OTHER LITTLE SIDE PROJECTS AT THE MOMENT? Yeah, I have some ideas for projects, but we’ll have to see how they develop. I picked up an old acoustic recently, and this has not only changed the way I approach the new Gumbo Ya-Ya’s material, it also made me want to start something with guitar. I’ve been jamming with some other bands as well, I did a few shows as session bassist with The Wanton Bishops from Lebanon while they were down here, and then I am also going to start playing some live shows with the dudes from ODA in the near future. WHAT WOULD YOU SAY SPARKED OFF YOUR PER-

One part blues heart all tore up and brought to the boil with strung out rockabilly nerves and a trashy garage brain, willow whisked into a swampy concoction.

HOW DO YOU SEE THE LIFESPAN OF THE BAND UNFOLD IN THE FUTURE, SIMILAR TO THE PRIMITIVES OR WILL YOU JUST LET IT TAKE ITS OWN COURSE AND TAKE IT FROM THERE? This is like asking me how long I expect to live. All we can really do is figure it out as we go forward – or backwards, or wherever we end up going.

spirit of the gumbo Dr John & the Night Trippers Gris-Gris 1968 Atco

The Gun Club Fire of Love 1981

The Gories Houserockin’ 1989

THE CRAMPS Smell Of Female 1983

The Black Lips The Black Lips 2002

Ruby Records

Wanghead

Enigma

BOMP!

I met Gio around March/April. He was just some dude that started working at Clarke’s, and I tried to help him find a place to stay. His girlfriend knew THE LAKE

THE LAKE

campeão JOSE MARIA JOAO / survivor WRITER - RUAN SCOTT

PHOTOGRAPHY - Grant Payne

“MY NAME IS JOSE MARIA JOAO. I AM FROM ANGOLA. I WAS BORN ON 19 MARCH 1972. I CAME TO CAPE TOWN IN 2000. I COULD NOT SPEAK ENGLISH. I WAS 15 YEARS OLD WHEN UNITA REBELS CAPTURED ME WHILE I WAS WALKING HOME FROM THE MARKET WHERE I WAS SELLING MANGOES TO SUPPORT MY FAMILY. I WAS FORCED TO EITHER JOIN THIS REBEL ARMY OR GET KILLED ON THE SPOT. THIS WAS A REALITY I HAD BEEN AVOIDING SINCE I WAS BIG ENOUGH TO WALK TO SCHOOL ON MY OWN. I WAS A BIG CHILD SO BEING ON THE RUN HAS BEEN WITH ME SINCE I WAS SMALL.” A recent three minute video clip ‘RUN JOSE’ by director dave meinhart and produced by MCDuff films tells the story of Jose, a bouncer at a popular restaurant on Kloof Nek road in Cape Town, South Africa and it had the online community ablaze. Masterfully produced, the clip touches on Jose’s life and makes it pretty clear that Jose, a local celebrity of sort, has a deeper and darker story to tell. This is his story It’s a story about constantly running, running from and running towards. This is his story.

and sorry to the families that are left without their children because of me.”

Jose was born to the youngest sibling of three. His two sisters were lucky enough to know their father. He had died in military action while Jose was still an infant. Growing up was tough. Going to school consisted of a 20 km walk through hell. Warfare, landmines, burning cars and bodies rotting like old trash into the Angolan soil were everyday sightings. “Every day I would return home after school to nothing. There was nothing to eat, nothing to do, no paper or pens to do homework with. My mother and sisters worked what jobs they could. Selling fruit at the market or chopping wood in the fields. When I was ten tears I decided that I wanted to make some money to help my family so I left school. I was just buying and selling fruit at the market. I did this for five years. Every day I saw the UNITA rebels creating chaos, hitting woman and looking for new recruits. That time I was still a small boy so they just pushed me out of the way.”

Jose woke up cold. He sat up and knew he had to leave. After six years in this civil war, he went from boy soldier to colonel. He had to run away. He sat and planned his exit. Capture meant certain death. He would leave the base camp and head down to the river under the guise that he was filling his canteen with water. From there he would sneak around the foot of the mountain and head south as there was no point in heading up north into Africa. The instability in the north just meant more danger.

Growing up was not only a struggle but every day as Jose got older the fear that soon the rebels would take him grew stronger within. By age 12 he was living a life on the lookout. He was big for his age and if the rebels got hold of him then he was sure to go to war. It happened during the second half of 1988 when he was 15 years old. Walking home from the market after another day of hustling, ducking and diving, he saw black smoke pluming into the air around the bend on the road up ahead. He was used to it though. It was probably a car or tyres set alight by rebels. However, he still proceeded with caution when suddenly rebel forces appeared on the border. Accustomed to running and intuitive to fleeing, he put his parcel of market goods down and quickly planned his escape. It was too late. Rebels had caught up with him from behind. There was no escape. He knew the protocol, surrender or die. He had seen it so many times before during his short time on this planet. Jose accepted his fate. He was now a ‘child soldier’. The first and only thing they taught him in the rebel military was how to use an AK-47. “The bullets go here, you hold the gun like this and then shoot”, he was told. The day he entered the camp, that same night he was making ground with a group of new recruits. His youth was stolen in an instant and now he would steal life from others in an instant too. “The war changes your mind. It’s all kill, kill, kill. Blood everywhere. Blood all the time. When you see this everyday it changes your mind.” For six long years Jose fought in the Angolan Civil War. A war that stretched for nearly 27 years and left a beautiful country and its people forever flawed. The war was a power struggle. After the colonisation by Portuguese settlers which induced a war between the people of the land, a civil war broke out between liberation movements - The People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). The one hated the other. And both made promises of a better life but only seemed to make things worse. “We walked for days through the bush. Pushing people out of their villages and plundering what they had. It was how we survived. If they didn’t want to join UNITA or if they supported the opposition then the answer was simple, you kill them.” Nights were spent in the bush between mosquitos and snakes, where the only other sounds were gunfire and bombs. Food came in the form of animals that got hunted or slaughtered from village camps. Off times were spent training, exercising, boxing and learning Jiu Jitsu. “Today I am trained in boxing and Jiu Jitsu. The war also teach me about survival and to keep going in tough times.” “One battle against the opposition an MPLA soldier shot my friend. He was my best friend. I had known him from the market when we were small boys. The bullet cut his side open and his insides were hanging out. They kept shooting and I got hit above the ankle. I picked up my friend and carried him behind some thick bushes. I tore my uniform and tried to put his stomach inside him again. He tell me, no Jose. Go, I am dead now. Go and kill. I sat with him until his breathing stopped and just covered him with some leaves and bushes. After that I really went to war. You lose your mind and everything goes dark.” Jose carries on to explain that he managed to find the soldiers who killed his friend and put an end to their existence, in close range. “I do not know how many people died from my gunfire, but I am sorry about those who did

The longer Jose fought, the more he wanted to leave. “It came to me in a dream. I believe today it was a message from God. I was sleeping in our main camp on a mountain with a river below where we got fresh water to drink. In my dream I was thinking why? Why are we all killing each other? We are all people of the land of Angola.”

As Jose got up, another soldier woke up. Thoughts of abandoning his mission shot through Jose’s mind. Strong willed with freedom in his mind, Jose talked softly and told his companion that he needed to fill his water bottle. The other soldier urged him to take his gun for safety. As Jose approached the river he was overcome with fear and excitement but he knew he had to stay calm and stay focussed. He knew he had to run. It was the thing he knew best. Armed with two guns, a water bottle and cladded only in his uniform, Jose made his way through the thick Angolan bush. In the dead of night many dangers lurked behind bushes, trees and behind every rock and boulder. Snakes, poisonous plants, lions and landmines. Jose kept running. Running until he could no longer carry his own weight, only wetting his lips every so often to preserve his precious water supply. “After the dream, when I started to run, I could still hear the song of the war in my head. BOOM! TATATATA! TATATATA BOOM! With every step forward it was like a friend in front of me said ‘come’, ‘come’. Calling me and telling me there is a better life waiting. This kept me going.” Jose ran for 14 days with minimal sleep and barely any food, eating only what the bush provided in the form of edible roots and berries, before he stopped and planned again. He needed directions to the border between Angola and Namibia. On the edge of the bush, close to a pathway, he stood scoping out the territory. In the distance he saw a group of woodcutters. He had to discard his regalia to avoid detection. He cut of the legs to his pants and sleeves of his shirt, turned them inside out and relinquished his weaponry. From here on forward he would be unarmed. “My skin was very dark. I was in the sun all day, every day for six years so I had become very dark. I didn’t look like the other people. I was afraid that this might give me away.” He walked towards the woodcutters. Nerves building. Out of nowhere came what Jose considered an angel. “An old mama appeared and asked me why I was wondering so far off from the other workers.” Jose could do nothing other than confide in her. He needed help. He told her his story, how he is fleeing form the war in Angola and was heading south towards Namibia. This was the first time Jose had spoken to another human in two weeks. She heard his plight and told him to turn around and go back down the path towards the river. There he would get fresh water and must carry on with that path towards the border post. She handed him her water can and a piece of wire to carry it. She also urged him to stay in his disguise in case he ran into strangers that might raise the alarm. After all, he was still in Angola. Jose did exactly as instructed and carried on stealthily. Walking for a day, he saw the border post on the horizon. He saw Angolan military vehicles, civilian vehicles and other trucks carrying goods in and out of Namibia and Angola. Having no papers to state his identity or status, he knew crossing the border naked like that would result in detention. He sat in the distance for two days viewing the comings and goings at the border post, plotting his next move. During those times border patrol was not what it is today and the only obstacle between these two countries was a dilapidated fence. Jose waited for the cover of night to execute his next move. After sunset he jumped the fence approximately 2 km from the border post and walked straight along the road that lead up to the border, while keeping a safe distance. By the position of the moon, a skill Jose picked up in the military, he could tell the time and the distance he had travelled. He walked for three hours after jumping the fence into Namibia and then cut towards the road and walked back form the Namibian side, towards

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the border post. Once there he would claim that he came from the Namibian side and was looking for a lift back towards town. A town he didn’t know as he had never been to Namibia. By sunrise Jose was at the border post. His initial fears of loitering were quickly subdued as many other people were doing it, waiting, trying to organise a lift. Getting a ride to Windhoek seemed easy at first, considering what he had just been through, however this deemed itself far more difficult than he could of imagined. Money was the primary obstacle and Jose had none. “After about three weeks on the border post begging and sleeping right there next to the road, I noticed large trucks coming from Angola. The people who could pay the drivers some money got lifts.” Jose needed a lift desperately. As a truck pulled up one night and picked up people, he inconspicuously stood closer. A few people got on. As the truck pulled away, Jose ran after it and jumped on the back. The other passengers looked at him flabbergasted but with the bouldering size of his body, dark skin and killer demeanour, he silenced the few passengers on board with a single hand gesture. “While I was running through the Angolan bush I promised never to be violent again. I knew that violence brings more violence and that I had done enough damage. Being unarmed, I used intimidation to get by. I don’t ever want to hurt anyone again.” With no idea how far he was going to travel to Windhoek (their destination), fear of detection was what kept Jose awake. “I would look through the cracks in the side of the truck to try and see what time it was and how far we were. One time we stopped to put petrol in and the other people in the back of the truck were sleeping. I knew the driver was going to check the back. I jumped out as the truck slowed down and stood around the petrol tanks, minding my own business as if I was there all day. Then when the driver pulled away I ran and jumped in the back. Some of the passengers were awake now but raised no alarm. We drove through the night and when the sun was out I could see the road and I starting planning again.”

“For me you see, all I want is peace. I want to help others the way I was helped on my travel here to South Africa.” a few nights watching, observing and learning the comings and the goings of the people on post. Only this time it would prove itself a bit more difficult. Instead of a little fence bordering two countries, there was the vast expanse of the Orange River that washed ferociously past him, blocking his entry into the country. Hungry and tired, he felt like giving up but his perseverance had brought him this far so to carry on was his only option. To carry on and to run had worked best. In his sight was what is known today as the Vioolsdrift border post. He couldn’t cross there for obvious reasons so he made his way down the Orange River, looking for a safe and easy way to cross out of sight from the border patrol. He came across a guy with a small rowing boat and tried to get the guy to help him cross the river, but the guy said it was dangerous and that he would do it for a fee. Jose had no money. So again Jose sat and looked over the river, imagining his freedom. One day the river seemed to be calmer than previous days. After staring at the river continuously for the past few days, Jose picked up on this instantly. He noticed some boulders protruding from the water and saw that if he mapped out his route carefully then he could jump across, hopping from boulder to boulder. He sat there the whole day staring and planning. When nightfall came he retraced the plan in his mind and jumped from rock to rock, into South Africa. From here the story played out very similarly to his trip through Namibia. Hiking, walking and running. Sleeping outdoors, hungry, cold and tired. Getting by on the goodwill of strangers, it took Jose another month of grovelling and hustling to get from the Orange River to Cape Town. Jose arrived in Cape Town in December 2000, where he made his way straight to the city. “I could still speak no English when I came here but I heard a lot of Portuguese and saw many Angolans who ran away from the war just like I did. I spent my first few nights sleeping in the Company Gardens and quickly saw that Long Street was a very busy street and I could maybe make some money here. I remember sitting across the road from a very busy place where there were many motorbikes. I saw the car guards getting money for parking cars and I thought I could do this too.”

As the road signs flashed by, Jose could make out that he was getting closer to Windhoek. “When we were 70 km from the city I waited for the truck to slow down and then I jumped, falling hard and rolling right there in the dust. I could walk the rest of the way.”

“I started parking cars outside this place on Long Street. Getting a R5 here or a R3 there, slowly picking up English. I did this for about a year or so. I quickly got to know the regulars and quickly got to know the boss of the place. I was there parking cars every day, all day. Sleeping where I could. One day, the owner said he can give me job in his bar in Green Point for clearing glasses of tables. Later I was, because I am so big and strong, the bouncer at the bar. I was cleaning glasses by day and then I was bouncer by night. One day this place close and I went to work in a garden in Hout Bay. The garden made me feel too much like Namibia again so I left when the job was done, after two months. I went back to Long Street. In-between all the jobs, finding a place to live, learning English and saving money for food and clothes, I also had to renew my visa papers every two years. I always had a steady Job here in Cape Town and bosses to help me, so getting a renewal has never been a problem.”

It was 1995 when Jose arrived in Windhoek. In the first few days he managed to get by with the help of strangers by begging at the shopping malls. His English was non-existent and few people spoke Portuguese. Communication was a problem. A kind-hearted stranger took it upon himself to help Jose with some clean clothes and food. This was the first time since running from Angola that Jose had put on clean clothes. He also told Jose in very broken Portuguese that he could apply for refugee status at the embassy in town. Jose went back to his park bench that night, excited by the prospects of being legal and getting some help. He had been running for over two months by this time and could do with new wind in his sails. In the following days Jose obtained asylum in Namibia as a refugee and was moved to an Angolan refugee camp. Here he spent 5 long hard years. Local farmers would collect refugees to work their fields and farms. Relieved by some stability, income and safety, Jose found himself to be content but he also felt sad. “I would see mothers with their children and I would wonder if my sister and mother were still alive. I had not seen them since the day the rebels captured me.” For five long years Jose worked for a farmer. He chopped, packed and loaded wood onto big trucks that were destined for South Africa. He would regularly converse with the truckers about life in South Africa. They said there was work there and people got paid good money. He asked the drivers for lifts but nobody wanted to risk their jobs and the best he got was some advice on where to go. Jose dutifully carried on with his job, cutting and stacking wood on trucks that were going where he wanted to be. Jose saved up all the money he could, until one day he acted. He knew what to do and how to do it. He was good at running, staying incognito and using this to his benefit. He waited for the sun to set and for the final whistle to blow, signalling the end of the working day. When the other workers headed home or back to the camp, he lingered around waiting for it to get darker. By this stage he knew the area and knew which way Windhoek was. He walked for most of the night along the side of the road, trying to hitchhike but to avail. By dusk the following morning he had reached the other side of Windhoek and stood below a road sign that read, “Cape Town 1500 km.” Jose knew that traveling by day meant the possibility of getting apprehended by control officers or police and he didn’t want to risk his potential freedom. So he slept most of the day, not far from the road, waiting for night. No food and very little money, Jose carried out his trek towards South Africa by night. Hitchhiking meant money and he didn’t want to spend it all in one go. “I had lost count of the days and distance I travelled by foot but it was somewhere like 3 weeks or maybe 4, catching rides, bribes, intimidation and walking.” Always only traveling by night. He knew that with every step forward it was one step closer. On his last ride with a group of guys in a very old and rusty car, Jose saw a sign that showed 70 km to the border. Again, Jose had experience with a situation like this and got the driver to pull over. He would walk the rest of the way. He approached the border post carefully, always keeping a safe distance. He spent

“I was not running or exercising much then but I could feel in my mind and in my legs that I wanted to run for strength again. So one guy, he take me to Lions Head and I run. I run up the mountain and back down again. Just for that feeling again. I started doing this every day. I still do this today.” Jose has worked as a bouncer at many clubs and bars around town and is well known on the social scene as a big man with the heart of gold. “The people here they know me. I have lots of patience for the people. Me, I don’t drink. But all these peoples here who drink, you see I help them. I promised to never get violent again. Therefore, I train and do boxing. Anyone can come train with me. It’s a good way to clear the mind.” “For me you see, all I want is peace. I want to help others the way I was helped on my travel here to South Africa. I help on Wednesdays at the church on Kloof Street where we give food to homeless people. I also want to start a house where I can help keep people from the street and maybe start a training gym. I must help the people and I must always keep running. Not running away but running to stay fit and to stay strong, to keep my mind healthy. I run to stay here at home.” And as for the gold tooth - “I got it here in South Africa. When I was a boy selling fruit at the market there was a big man with a gold tooth just like this one. He was always buying lots of things and one day he bought some fruit from me and I told him that one day I too will have a gold tooth like him.” Jose travelled approximately 2550 km from Angola to Cape Town over an extended period of time. Some parts he ran and some parts he walked. Other periods were spent in motorised transport. This does not include the distance he trekked within the war zone and the many detours he made to stay out of harm’s way. This is a true showcase of human spirit and endurance. For this, Jose Maria Joao is a hero.

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ARTICLE ZHANE’ WARREN / WARREN EDITIONS QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - HAYDEN PHIPPS

“The studio can boast of a very successful internship program. The interns have ranged from students to young professionals, artists, musicians, designers, illustrators, producers, photographers, writers, mothers and all ranging between 16 and 61 years of age.” WHEN DID YOU ESTABLISH WARREN EDITIONS AND WHERE WERE YOU SITUATED BEFORE THE STUDIO IN ROELAND STREET? I established Warren Editions in 2008 on the top floor of a derelict building in Bree Street, affectionately called by Capetonians – ‘The Loft’. Many people have fond memories of the activities in The Loft space. The space has been used as a club, a design quarters for ‘Daddy buy me a Pony’ owned by Peet Pienaar and a home for photographer Pieter Hugo. WHERE DO YOU FEEL YOUR LOVE FOR PRINTMAKING CAME FROM AND WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE IT ON AS A SERIOUS PROFESSION? My love for printmaking was ignited at university, second year, when I was introduced to etching and lithography. I was sold and smitten. To print was all I wanted to do and for the first time something really made sense to me. So being a printer came to me naturally, for me it was a case of having been chosen by the printmaking gods and not the other way around. Almost 20 years later it is my profession. YOU ATTENDED THE KAREL DE GROTE HOGESKOOL AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP, WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO RETURN TO SOUTH AFRICA AND START YOUR OWN STUDIO? No other place is like South Africa. I returned with a vision. It just made absolute sense to me to have a printmaking studio in the heart of Cape Town. WHAT ROUTE DID YOU TAKE TO FULFILL YOUR PASSION, HOW LONG DOES IT NORMALLY TAKE TO BECOME A MASTER PRINTER? After I graduated with a BAFA, I just continued making work in the printmaking medium. My journey started as a third year fine art student, printing for my fellow students. All I then wanted in return was a printer’s proof. You see it’s not everyone’s idea of fun to slog away at pulling prints from etching plates. Besides a way to start my art collection, it was exhilarating for me to be spending my time at an etching press and hand-wiping ink off an etched plate. The path that started here led to Belgium where I studied and lived in Antwerp, while I assisted and headed up projects with artists and other printmakers. The path from there has taken me to where I am now – the director and head printer of Warren Editions. It has been a long road filled with many challenges. In order to achieve something, hard work must be done. The term Master Printer in some respects is archaic and outdated. It smacks of a guild system that no longer exists, and is used flippantly by people that have been printing professionally for a few months or a year. To really be using the term Master Printer, a person must have been doing the print ‘thing’ for 20 years in a professional setup. The title must be earned. I think it can be earned through the level of skill, knowledge and understanding gained about a particular field in printmaking, but more importantly coupled with the printer’s ability to have insight into the development of a body of work in print with an artist. And, the printer’s ability to run a project successfully and collaborate with an artist on works in print in a manner that ensures

that the artist feels that they are working with someone that understands their intentions for their overall body of work. Achieving the ability to observe, listen and to be conscientious is at the core of becoming a great printmaker. A Master Printer is most certainly not the person that hides his ‘secret’ techniques. But, in actuality I view myself rather as a ‘midwife’ or as ‘the caretaker’.

A stocky and ‘to the point’ Afrikaans engineer operating in Meyerton outside Johannesburg made the she-monster (the name given to her, after the monotype titled She-Monster by Georgina Gratrix). I have been ordering presses from him since I was 22 years old. Interestingly, he made his first etching press for his then art student girlfriend, when he was an engineering student in Pretoria.

THE STUDIO SPECIALISES IN THE INTAGLIO TECHNIQUES OF ETCHING AND PHOTO-POLYMER, AS WELL AS MONOTYPE, RELIEF AND SILKSCREEN. WHICH ONE OF THESE TECHNIQUES ARE THE MOST DIFFICULT TO EXECUTE AND WHICH OF THEM DO YOU PERSONALLY PREFER TO WORK WITH?

YOU CHOOSE TO USE BRASS INSTEAD OF THE PREFERRED METHOD OF USING COPPER TO DO YOUR ETCHINGS WITH. WHAT MADE YOU START USING THE BRASS AND WHY WOULD YOU SAY IT’S FAR BETTER THAN COPPER?

The most difficult technique in my opinion, and will surprise most, is monotype. The technique that I personally prefer is etching. REGARDLESS OF ALL THE TECHNIQUES THAT THE STUDIO SPECIALISES IN, WHICH ONE WOULD YOU SAY THE STUDIO IS MOST WELL-KNOWN FOR? The studio is known for etching and monotype. THE STUDIO REGULARLY WORKS WITH ESTABLISHED ARTISTS BUT ALSO WITH EMERGING ONES, WHAT SORT OF APPLICATION PROCESS IS INVOLVED IN ORDER TO COLLABORATE WITH THE STUDIO? There is no application process. I invite the artists to come to Warren Editions. There is however an organic process supporting the interest that I have in certain artists. I really appreciate their work and their work inspires me to want to make prints (or even art in general). I can visualise prints resolved in their style and imagery, and pertinent to the process is that the body of prints produced should fit into the vision I have for Warren Editions and contribute meaningfully to contemporary printmaking and art. Last (but not least) the artist’s profile does play a role. Many of the successful prints that have been created at Warren Editions manifest the achievements and success of the studio. They contain within them the particular strategies I have as a printmaker, the adaptability of the studio and means of insight, by the artist and I, required to produce quality fine art prints. These prints have also helped to shape the image of Warren Editions. Choosing what to produce is often an organic and intuitive process. The artists would usually explore thematic concerns and imagery found in their other works, but the parameters set by printmaking changes the approach and methodology that usually would be followed by the artist. The process entails required elements to come together for producing a successful print. These include how particular techniques are employed, stylistic aspects, will the image translate well into a print and will the eventual print heighten the profile of the artist and reinforce the existence of contemporary printmaking.

The facts about Brass: metal alloy of copper and zinc (containing approximately 70 – 80% copper)harder than copper and light gold in colour. Opinion about Brass, based on years of experience with the metal: Does not tarnish and oxidise at the fast rate that copper does and is excellent for print production because the etch and non-etch areas can clearly be discerned on the metal surface. THE STUDIO STARTED A VERY SUCCESSFUL INTERNSHIP PROGRAM IN 2008. HOW DO STUDENTS APPLY FOR SUCH AN INTERNSHIP AND HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT CHOOSING POTENTIAL INTERNS? The studio can boast of a very successful internship program. The interns have ranged from students to young professionals, artists, musicians, designers, illustrators, producers, photographers, writers, mothers and all ranging between 16 and 61 years of age. More than 40 interns have turned a flywheel at Warren Editions. The details for the application is on the website. The most important component of the application for me is the letter of intent, if I like what I read then I try and meet the applicant so as to get a face-to-face impression. THE STUDIO HAS COLLABORATED WITH AN ABUNDANCE OF ARTISTS. WERE THERE ANY OF THESE THAT PERSONALLY STAND OUT FOR YOU? Christian Nerf, Michael Taylorr and Georgina Gratrix YOU ALSO HOST VARIOUS WORKSHOPS AT THE STUDIO, HOW OFTEN DO THESE WORKSHOPS HAPPEN AND WHAT DOES THE PROGRAM ENTAIL IF SOMEONE WISHES TO ENROLL IN ONE OF THESE COURSES? The studio has through the years attempted at creating a workshop program and has had successful work-

shops, but the workload and studio activities always outweigh my intention. In 2014 the studio did not host any workshops because there was just too much going on. I would however really like to host an etching and aquatint workshop in 2015. I hope this is obtained. Watch this space. YOU PRACTICED AS QUITE A PROMINENT VISUAL AND PERFORMANCE ARTIST UNTIL 2007, WAS IT A CONSCIOUS DECISION TO STOP AND DO YOU SEE YOURSELF TAKING ON ANY MORE PERSONAL PROJECTS AGAIN IN THE FUTURE? Yes, it was a hard decision to make. My view then, and still so now, was that I wanted to focus on either one, that being either a successful artist or a successful printer. I had juggled being an artist and a printer in my 20s. By the time I was 31 I knew I needed clarity. Being a printer offered this to me. My strong need to start my own studio and the vision for this studio was far clearer than what I needed in order to be an artist. Do I see myself taking on personal projects, yes I do. Although, these will not entail me standing naked for hours or being down on my knees for days, as I was willing to do then. So, watch this space. THE STUDIO ALSO ACTS AS A GALLERY. DO YOU ONLY EXHIBIT PRINTED WORK THAT HAS BEEN PRINTED BY THE STUDIO OR DO YOU SOMETIMES HOST OTHER WORK IN DIFFERENT MEDIUMS? The gallery is in-house, the space allows for the showcasing of the prints produced by Warren Editions. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF HAVING YOUR OWN GALLERY ALONGSIDE THE PRINTING STUDIO? WAS IT A DELIBERATE IDEA TO HAVE A JOINED GALLERY WITH THE SPACE OR DID IT JUST EVOLVE OUT OF NECESSITY? I always had the need to show-off the prints after I worked so hard on them. I yearned for a separate space that contains the print drawers and a large display table to pack the prints onto when visitors and potential buyers come to the studio. The gallery fulfills both for me. But, has also subsequently gained more purpose, the space allows for an artist and I to work on a body of prints while being mindful of the working methodology of the artist and their other mediums. An example of this is the work produced in collaboration with Katherine Bull and Christian Nerf with the exhibitions and performances that formed part of the body of prints. - www.warreneditions.com

mood tabilizer Tracy Chapman Tracy Chapman 1988

Lana Del Rey Born To Die 2012

Adele 19 2008

Vive La Fête Grand Prix 2005

Elektra

Polydor

Surprise

Beethoven BEETHOVEN

THE STUDIO BOASTS THE LARGEST PRESS IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE, WEIGHING IN AT 1,2 TONS AND MEASURING 3 X 1,5 M. WAS THE PRESS LOCALLY MADE OR HOW DID THE STUDIO COME ABOUT ACQUIRING SUCH A LARGE PRESS? THE LAKE

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STALKER JUSTIN POULTER

QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - JUSTIN POULTER

“For me the attraction to older formats is having the hard copy. Owning something that’s tangible, not just a digital copy. Being able to study a record sleeve’s artwork or hold up a negative to the light just makes it a bit more special to me.” MOST PEOPLE KNOW YOU AS QUITE A PROMINENT GRAPHIC DESIGNER AND ILLUSTRATOR, HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN SHOOTING FOR NOW AND WHERE DID YOUR INTEREST IN SHOOTING ON FILM COME FROM?

THERE IS A LOT OF INTEREST IN PEOPLE RETURNING TO USING OLDER EQUIPMENT AGAIN, INSTEAD OF DIGITAL - LPs, TAPES OR IN THIS CASE FILM. WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE DRAW CARD LURING PEOPLE BACK INTO THE PAST AGAIN?

When I studied graphic design we had photography as a small part of our curriculum. We learnt all the dark room basics, beginning with making our own pinhole cameras, developing the film ourselves and progressing to using SLRs with full studio lighting setups. At the time I enjoyed it but found it very technical and frustrating. My interest in photography really boiled over when I moved to England in 2010. All the fresh sights and all the people got me really hyped. Thanks to my course at college, 35mm seemed like the natural way to go for me.

For me the attraction to older formats is having the hard copy. Owning something that’s tangible, not just a digital copy. Being able to study a record sleeve’s artwork or hold up a negative to the light just makes it a bit more special to me. It’s also a thing of quality for me. I like the grain and contrast results that I get when shooting on film. I find that I hardly have to do any editing besides the odd cropping. It’s hard to speak about my reasons without sounding snobbish. I don’t think using film makes it harder, or makes you better at all. It’s purely just a personal preference for now.

WHAT CAMERA ARE YOU SHOOTING WITH AT THE MOMENT AND WHAT MADE YOU CHOOSE THAT PARTICULAR MODEL? I use two different cameras at the moment. A Canon AE-1 SLR for the landscape and travel sort of stuff, and a Contax TVS for the portrait stuff. The Contax is small, unobtrusive and easy to carry around, which is ideal for shooting people’s portraits. I like that it has auto focus, but you can still manually set the aperture and focus distance if you want. DO YOU HAVE A SELECTION OF CAMERAS THAT YOU SHOOT WITH OR DO YOU MOSTLY STICK WITH ONE? I go through phases with cameras. I get bored of them or they end up dying on me. I also really enjoy the search for good quality 35mm cameras and the challenge of learning how to use them properly. It’s hit and miss, sometimes you get really lucky. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT CHOOSING THE SUBJECT MATTER THAT YOU DOCUMENT? WHAT DRAWS YOU TOWARDS A CERTAIN FRAME, COMPOSITION OR CHARACTER? I think it just comes down to personal taste. Besides one or two test shoots I did recently, there’s never really been any sort of brief or requirements so it’s purely what catches my eye. Sometimes I think I like something, but then as a photo it doesn’t really work. Most of the time it’s just my friends and the places I go.

IT SEEMS THAT IT’S MORE OF AN ARTISTIC INTEREST TO PEOPLE RATHER THAN A MASS MOVEMENT. I CAN’T IMAGINE MAINSTREAM WORKING PHOTOGRAPHERS REVERTING BACK TO FILM ANYTIME SOON, UNLESS IT’S FOR A PERSONAL OR CREATIVE JOB. DO YOU THINK THE MEDIUM WILL EVENTUALLY JUST FADE AWAY COMPLETELY? I really hope it doesn’t. I know certain formats and processes are becoming less available. Digital cameras are also getting better and better. In terms of mainstream or commercial photography, I think it just makes a lot more sense to shoot digitally. You can get a lot more options in a quicker space of time and make decision while you go, based on results. HOW MANY PICTURES DO YOU USUALLY FIND TO BE ‘KEEPERS’ IN ONE ROLL OF FILM? IT’S NOT AS IF YOU

CAN HAVE A QUICK LOOK, DELETE AND RE-SNAP IT AGAIN. DO YOU SOMETIMES TAKE A PHOTO TWICE, JUST TO BE SURE? I’ve found that it depends on my experience with the camera. In the beginning the results are always inconsistent but then they start to improve with time. The most challenging thing for me when shooting portraits is the human interaction side of it. It’s difficult to get people to be themselves or just carry on doing what they were doing before you lifted up the camera. FILM AND THE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS IS QUITE A PRICEY EXERCISE THESE DAYS, DO YOU FIND THAT IT MAKES YOU THINK MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECT MATTER THAT YOU CHOOSE TO DOCUMENT? I used to think about it a lot, to try and not waste pictures. I found that when I started to think about it less, my pictures got better. It’s easy to miss out on a potentially good shot where something interesting is happening but the composition doesn’t feel right. DO HAVE ANY PARTICULAR BRAND OF FILM THAT YOU PREFER TO USE OR DO YOU JUST SHOOT WITH WHATEVER IS AVAILABLE AT THE TIME? I generally use Kodak Superior just because it’s easily available and cheap. I treat myself to some Ilford black and white every now and then. Also, I pretty much only shoot on 400 speed. I find it’s adaptable to different light conditions and I like the grain density. YOU’RE AN ACTIVE SKATEBOARDER AND THAT MEANS YOU MOVE AROUND THE CITY QUITE A BIT, A LOT OF IT REFLECTS IN YOUR WORK. HAVE YOU CONSIDERED MOVING AROUND NATURE A BIT MORE OR

ARE YOU MOSTLY INTO URBAN ENVIRONMENTS? I really enjoy being in nature and shooting there, I just end up doing it a lot more in the city when I’m out on my board or walking about. I’m trying my best not to pigeonhole myself with photos. I want to get a bit of everything, in personal experience and photography. I used to only take my camera out when I was going on a day trip or seeing a new place. But, now I try to take it with me on everyday routes. I like the challenge of finding new interest in familiar scenes. DO YOU FIND THAT YOUR PHOTOGRAPHY INFLUENCES YOUR DESIGN WORK IN ANY WAY? Sometimes the things that I take pictures of, like signs, etc. But, at this point I see them as two pretty separate things. I like it that way for now, having photography as more of a hobby than a profession. ONCE YOU’VE DEVELOPED A ROLL OF FILM, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE THE KEY FACTORS THAT MAKE YOU DECIDE ON WHICH PICTURES YOU CHOOSE TO UPLOAD ONTO YOUR BLOG? Normally it’s just simple basics like focus, composition, exposure, etc. I don’t really edit the stuff so if a picture doesn’t look good enough to me then I won’t labour over it just to get it up on my blog. DO YOU STILL SHOOT ANYTHING ON DIGITAL AT ALL OR ARE YOU ONLY SHOOTING WITH FILM AT THE MOMENT? I use my camera on my phone all the time, but that’s the only digital camera I really use at the moment. I’m looking into getting one soon though. I’ve never really owned a decent digital camera. YOU HAVE ACCUMULATED QUITE A BODY OF WORK OVER THE YEARS, ARE YOU WORKING TOWARDS SOME SORT OF EXHIBITION OR WHAT ARE YOUR PLANS WITH ALL THE PICTURES YOU HAVE IN YOUR ARCHIVE? I don’t really have any specific plans at this point. I’d love to do some kind of book or zine on my own at some point but for now I’m just going to keep taking pictures. Hopefully a strong theme will develop that’s exhibition worthy, but right now I don’t really see my pictures that way.

JUSTIN’s red hot HIP SWINGERS Sonic Youth Daydream Nation 1988 Blast First

Canon AE-1 SLR

Thee Oh Sees Drop 2014 Castle Face

My Bloody Valentine Loveless 1991 Creation

Pixies Doolittle 1989

Melvins (A) Senile Animal 2006

4AD

Ipecac

Canon AE-1 SLR THE LAKE

UTOPIA KIRSTEN LILFORD QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

IMAGES - KIRSTEN LILFORD

“For me it is not necessarily about choosing to create a conscious divide between reality and the environment in my paintings. My work is about trying to make sense of a reality, whether it is my own or someone else’s.”

YOU STUDIED AT THE MICHAELIS SCHOOL OF FINE ART, GRADUATED IN 2011 AND CURRENTLY WORKING AS AN ART DIRECTOR AT A ADVERTISING AGENCY. FOR ME PERSONALLY, THESE TWO WORLDS SEEMS TO BE AT THE OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE CREATIVE SPECTRUM. HOW DO YOU FIND THE CROSSOVER FROM WORKING AS AN ACTIVE ARTIST TO THE SOMEWHAT FORCED CREATIVITY WITHIN AGENCY LIFE? The two are very different but I feel that the one complements the other. Advertising is fast paced and deadline orientated, qualities that are in fact very useful to the artist. I am very specific about setting aside time to paint in my quiet studio. I have allocated time in my week to paint and I do not let anything get in the way of this. YOU ARE ALSO A RECIPIENT OF THE PRESTIGIOUS SOUTH AFRICAN SOCIETY OF ARTISTS AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN PAINTING – WHAT MADE YOU CHOOSE TO GO AND WORK IN ADVERTISING RATHER THAN BECOMING A FULL-TIME PAINTER? I decided to be an artist as well as an art director about 18 months ago. For me, the decision was based on the fact that I wanted another skillset. I have learnt a huge amount about marketing and working under pressure. These qualities are essential for any successful artist. I FIND YOUR WORKS VERY PEACEFUL, ALMOST AS IF THEY WERE FRAME GRABS FROM WITHIN A HAZY LUCID DREAM IN SOME SORT OF A SUNDAY LUNCH UTOPIA. HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO SEPARATE YOURSELF FROM REALITY, TO THE ENVIRONMENT YOU CREATE WITHIN Y OUR PAINTINGS? For me it is not necessarily about choosing to create a conscious divide between reality and the environment in my paintings. My work is about trying to make sense of a reality, whether it is my own or someone else’s. FROM TIME TO TIME I FIND MYSELF CATCHING A SLIGHT HINT TOWARDS A FOGGY VERSION OF DAVID HOCKNEY’S EARLY STILL LIFES. BUT YOUR WORK IS AUTHENTICALLY YOUR OWN, ARE THERE ANY PARTICULAR INFLUENCES THAT YOU WOULD SAY HELPED SHAPED YOUR WORK TO THE WAY WE SEE IT NOW? The work of the Impressionists, particularly Bonnard, Vuillard and Cassatt have influenced my work. In terms of more contemporary South African artists, I am inspired by the work of Lisa Brice and Penny Siopis. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT CHOOSING THE SUBJECTS AND COMPOSITIONS PORTRAYED IN THE SCENES, I GET THE FEELING THAT THEY ARE TAKEN FROM OLD PHOTOGRAPHS AND FAMILY HOLIDAY SNAPS? WHAT MAKES YOU RELATE TO THE IMAGES YOU CHOOSE TO STUDY WITHIN YOUR WORK? 18

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I specifically select photographs that would form useful preliminary sketches for my paintings. By preliminary sketches I am referring to photographs that are in a sense ‘unfinished’ and as Gerhard Richter calls them, “non-art” photographs. These photographs form useful departure points for paintings. What is key for me is to find the unstable position of white upper-middle-class. I look for clues in various family photographs. Whether it is a rather blurred photograph of my mother smiling happily with a huge pregnant stomach while standing by the swimming pool or a photograph of a friend’s mother carefully dipping her new born baby’s feet into a florescent blue pool. Graham Clarke’s writing is useful to me in terms of how images can become vehicles for speaking about not just one family but about the picturing of the aspirations of the white middle class in South Africa as a whole. By using family photographs I also allow this shift from the private to the public to happen. The image’s historical background no longer becomes important as the image is no longer a representation of a real world but more an interpretation of that world. YOU WORK WITH OIL BASED PIGMENTS, HOW DO YOU ACHIEVE THE SOFT AND ALMOST TRANSPARENT APPLICATION OF COLOUR ON YOUR CANVAS? AT FIRST GLANCE I WAS ALMOST CONVINCED THAT IT WAS WATERCOLOUR, CAN YOU PLEASE SHARE YOUR WORKING TECHNIQUE WITH US? The act of applying paint is an act of chance. I can never predetermine how a painting will look, I can only apply paint and in a sense allow the paint to work itself out. Penny Siopis once told me that she works in a way that she “thinks it will happen”. I feel that this notion is true to my work too. I allow the paint pigment to break away from the linseed oil. I will evoke a garden creeper for example by the drips and clogged areas of paint pigment. Sometimes a large area canvas will have thin washes of oil paint diluted in turpentine and I will simply allow the paint to drip and move at its own accord. However, I will still maintain a certain degree of control over what drips to leave and what drips to keep. FROM WHAT I HAVE GATHERED YOU HAVE BEEN PART OF A FEW GROUP SHOWS AND ONE SOLO

SHOW AT SALON 91. ARE YOU ONLY REPRESENTED BY THEM AT THE MOMENT OR ARE YOU ABLE TO EXHIBIT FREELY AT ANY OTHER GALLERIES? I have had a few successful shows at Salon 91. Monique du Preez, the director, has formed a firm foundation for the beginning of my artistic career. However, I am not represented by Salon 91 and am open to exhibit with other galleries and have done so. WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE MEMORY FROM GROWING UP AS A CHILD THAT ENGAGED IN CREATIVE ACTIVITIES? WHY DO YOU THINK IT STUCK TO YOUR DEVELOPMENT AS AN INDIVIDUAL AND AN ARTIST? My own childhood has influenced a certain aspect of my work. I had a rather happy childhood, which consisted of privileged leisure activities such as swimming in the pool and playing in my garden. I guess this comfortable way of life has allowed me to look at family photographs from a nostalgic as well as a critical point of view. Growing up as a white middle-class female has formed the basis of my interest in the white middle-class suburbia, in the context of contemporary South Africa. HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS, ARE THERE ANY RITUALS OR PREPARATIONS THAT YOU TAKE ON BEFORE YOU START ON NEW PIECE OF CANVAS? I prefer to paint at the quieter times of the day, either in the early hours of the morning or late at night. I like to make sure I have all my paintbrushes lined up and my reference images visible. I often start playing music before I start to paint. DO YOU WORK ON MULTIPLE PIECES AT ONCE OR DO YOU STRICTLY FINISH THEM ONE BY ONE? HOW LONG DOES ANY PARTICULAR PIECE TAKE FROM START TO FINISH?

will leave a work for a month or two before I relook at it. This allows me to see the work with a fresh perspective. I usually take about 3 months to complete a painting, having said that I have left a few works for a year before I returned to them and completed the work. I THINK THE SIZE OF YOUR ARTWORKS DEFINITELY ACTS AS A DRAWING CARD TO THE VIEWER. DO YOU SEE YOURSELF WORKING ON EVEN BIGGER SCALE IN THE FUTURE OR ARE YOU SATISFIED WITH THE SIZE OF THE WORK FOR NOW? DO YOU THINK THE WORK WOULD HAVE HAD THE SAME IMPACT IF IT WERE PAINTED ON A SMALLER SURFACE? Yes, I agree. The bigger, the better! I am not sure I will go any bigger than my graduate pieces (some of the works were 2400 x 1800mm). I feel that if I had to work on a scale smaller than 600 x 900mm then my paintings would not be as successful. The large scale creates impact and shifts my subject into a curious space. YOUR WORK DEFINITELY HAS A STRONG AUTHENTIC FORM OF FINE ART TO IT. THERE ARE SO MANY YOUNG ARTISTS WHO ARE BASICALLY JUST ILLUSTRATORS THAT CONSIDER THEMSELVES FINE ARTISTS. WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE KEY ELEMENTS THAT SEPARATES THE TWO? Absolutely. I think that the two are separate and

both fulfill important roles. For me, illustration is a representation of everyday life, whereas fine art interprets and questions everyday life. VIGINIA MACKENNY SAID, “These essentially middle-class leisure activities embody a freedom not available to all in South Africa’s economic context. Overshadowed by sense of vague threat manifest through the darkening and isolating of such images, the privilege and vulnerability of such ease is highlighted”. DO YOU SOMETIMES FEEL PEOPLE ARE VERY QUICK TO ATTACH SOME FORM OF POLITICAL UNDER CURRENT TO ARTIST’S WORK. WHAT DO YOU FEEL IS YOUR PERSONAL MOTIVATION BEHIND THE IMAGERY YOU CHOOSE TO PAINT? Living in post Apartheid South Africa, one simply cannot separate the political from the artistic. I feel that as a white middle-class South African I play an important role in investigating the past as well as the future in our country. ARE YOU BUSY WITH A NEW BODY OF WORK AT THE MOMENT OR ARE THERE ANY FUTURE EVENTS HAPPENING FROM YOUR SIDE? I am in the process of preparing for a solo exhibition next year. I will also exhibit in a few group shows and art fairs nationally and internationally.

KIRSTENS CHOICE Niki & The Dove Instinct 2012 Mercury

Imogen Heap Speak For yourself 2005 Megaphonic

Oliver Tank Slow Motion Music 2013 Create/Control

Fleetwood Mac Rumours 1977

Garden State Soundtrack 2004

Warner Bros.

Epic

I work on lots of paintings simultaneously. Sometimes up to ten works at a time. I feel that this is best as it allows me to maintain a certain level of energy throughout my paintings. I sometimes THE LAKE

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DUSTED Warrick Sony / KALAHARI SURFERS QUESTIONS - HEIN COETZEE

IMAGES - WARRICK SONY

“I was the first dude to cut up tapes and use avant-garde shit with contemporary Lee Scratch Perry studio techniques on Afrikaans radio-political-speech-crazy-ass-punk ‘do it yourself’ mentality.” A CASE WITH A PRETTY INTENSE COURT SESSION THAT LED TO THE DEFACING OF THAT PARTICULAR ALBUM. DO YOU THINK THIS ACTUALLY HELPED TO REINFORCE THE AESTHETICS OF THE ‘CUT, PASTE AND REARRANGE’ STYLE OF YOUR ARTWORK AND MUSIC? One of my favourite artworks is Marcel Duchamps’ ‘The Large Glass’ (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even). I liked the fact that when they smashed it by accident for an exhibition, he calmly re-assembled it and exhibited as that. Similarly, I actually thought the ‘Beachbomb’ title was better and the banning forced me to come up with it. THE KALAHARI SURFERS’ FIRST RELEASE WAS A DOUBLE 7 INCH GATEFOLD UNDER A GERMAN LABEL IN 1982, WERE THERE ANY OTHER LABELS BEFORE SHIFTY THAT YOU WOULD’VE APPROACHED FOR A RELEASE? I was a big fan of Mute records in the UK but primarily the avant-garde label Recommended Records, who I approached and they released all my vinyl albums from 1985-1990. THE NAME ‘KALAHARI SURFERS’ IS QUITE A HOUSEHOLD NAME IN THE RIGHT CIRCLES AND ALSO PRESENT IN TEXT BOOKS IN MUSICAL STUDIES AT UNIVERSITY IN SA. HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THE TITLE ‘KALAHARI SURFERS’? The original Surfers band was myself along with Hamish Davidson and Brian Rath on Drums - we were at school together. Hamish and I played together a lot as kids and had the kind of a deep musical intuition that brothers often have. We often recorded ideas and stoned jams onto cassette tape. We made drum machines by recording ourselves playing percussion and ‘drummy’ things, and then we’d play it back through a VoxAC30 and jam along to that. The cassettes were all labeled with different titles. One was called ‘Hostile Giraffes’, one was called ‘Phallic Alec and the Cymbals’ - the one I sent to Germany was called Kalahari Surfers. The Dude in Germany at Pure Freude Records thought it was the band’s name and so it came to be. I got the logo by looking through the Michaelis Art School Library at Bushman art and put the surfboard onto the one I liked. The idea being juxtaposition between the extremes of minimalistic hunter-gatherer existence and the opulence of first world hi-tech fiberglass creations to ride waves with, as a recreational diversion. YOUR MUSIC STYLE IS OFTEN REFERRED TO AS A WILLIAM BURROUGHS APPROACH TO CUTTING UP AND REARRANGING THE CONTEXT AND MEANING OF SOUND AND COMPOSITION. WOULD YOU AGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT? Yes, I was a big fan of his technique and even wrote lyrics like that. For example, on the Beachbomb album there is the track ‘Gutted With the Glory’ which is a Burroughs cut up of the Lord’s Prayer with the SADF raid on Lesotho, in which a friend of ours was killed. YOUR ALBUM ‘BIGGER THAN JESUS 1989’ WAS BANNED BY THE OLD GOVERNMENT AND THERE WAS

THE SONG ‘UNDERGROUND’ FROM THE ALBUM ‘SLEEP ARMED 1986’ IS, IN MY OPINION, STILL VERY RELEVANT IN SOUTH AFRICA TODAY. WHERE WERE YOU WHEN YOU WROTE THIS PARTICULAR POST-PUNK ANTHEM? History repeats itself. That song is about good men who stand up to a repressive regime and are forced into secrecy and hiding to stay alive. We saw it in the 80s when I wrote this. Victor Jara had been tortured and murdered in Chile, in a football stadium. We had seen the murder of Steve Biko and the disappearances of innocent members of our society. I had worked on a documentary for the BBC and we spent an hour driving around in circles to meet ANC underground operative Trevor Manual (who later became finance minister) - he had to be careful. Our leaders had all gone underground - I wrote it from that. I lived near huge mine slag heaps and disused shafts in Johannesburg, where people often hid. The song is set in a near future with similar possibilities. ‘TEARGAS’ ON YOUR ALBUM ‘SLEEP ARMED 1986’ IS QUITE ARCANE AND TO THE NORMAL EAR IT’S ALMOST UNLISTENABLE, IS THERE A STORY BEHIND THIS SONG? We were playing a big ECC (End Conscription Campaign) concert at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg when the police rolled canisters of teargas into the packed concert hall. The resulting pandemonium and anger found its way into this song when I got back to the studio a few hours later. I laid that vocal down with real teargas coughing. The song itself was made from a loop I’d cut together from a recording I’d done of Ian Herman warming up for a session. YOU RECENTLY HAD A TALK AT THE SHIFTY MONTH TITLED ‘RADIO SILENCE’, WHICH DEALT WITH CENSORSHIP AND RADIO PLAY FOR ALTERNATIVE MUSICIANS. DO YOU THINK THIS IS STILL APPLICABLE ON RADIO TODAY AND ARE MUSICIANS STILL BEING SILENCED? Yes and no. Today there are millions of radio stations all around the world. You could be being played and you don’t even know about it. There are millions more people. There are podcasters and blogs. Also, it’s relatively easy to do your own well-produced sounding song and place it on Youtube or some internet based radio or whatever. Do it yourself is more prevalent now than during punk. Radio is archaic anyway, like television. People don’t want to be dictated to, they want to choose their own entertainment streams. Who cares if you don’t get played on radio? Fuck them! Radio is for the mindless.

WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RELEASING A CD OR LP?

WHAT IS YOUR NEXT PROJECT, AS A MUSICIAN AND AS AN ARTIST?

CDs were a crap idea from the start. The record companies wet their pants thinking of all the money they would make reissuing stuff on CD and when all the stuff was released they sat back in horror at the realisation that this would be their undoing. To make a vinyl record you take your track from its master and make an acetate and metal stamper, then you put your master recording back in your safe. The record is inferior to the master. The CD is your master. They were handing out all the master tapes to the world. The digital domain paved the way for piracy and the record industry invented it.

There are a few things I’m busy on. I have an Ableton Live instruments online shop called ‘Smiletone’ where I make Aphex Twin type African instruments, having spotted that very lucrative gap in the market… ha ha. A new album lying in wait of great audio collage epics and a few historic lyrical narratives. I’ve started a super-realism acoustic album of some of my previously released good tunes, using Ableton techniques and extreme computer expertise to make it sound like a real unplugged album. All acoustic stuff with a surreal edge, a sort of digital Chuck Close.

YOUR NEW ALBUM ‘TROPICAL BARBIE HAWAIIAN SURF SET’ ENCAPSULATES THE PERIOD BETWEEN 1982 UP UNTIL 1989. IN RETROSPECT, DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR MUSIC CAN STILL INFLUENCE YOUNG ARTISTS AND MUSICIANS TODAY? I hope young people will listen to these tunes and feel that they should follow their heart and express their feelings exactly the way they want. By tailoring your work to please some other objective, you are compromising the work and compromising your own integrity, that gets subliminally picked up by listeners. AS MENTIONED ABOVE, YOUR NEW LP IS RELEASED ON VINYL UNDER ANGRY AFRICA RECORDS AND ROASTIN’ RECORDS. WERE YOU SURPRISED WHEN YOU WERE OFFERED THE OPPORTUNITY TO RERELEASE OLD MATERIAL, THE WAY IT WAS RELEASED IN THE 80s? I was surprised because South Africa is a strange place. A very small market. A very small circle of like-minded individuals. For instance, Shifty Records was very eclectic. It had to be to survive. Releases covered genres from punk, jazz, folk and poetry to Worker choirs and Zulu Jive. There was always a small support base for each. My stuff had a support base of about 20 people and wasn’t what anyone had heard before. I didn’t sound like anyone else. The great thing about South Africa is that you could be the first, so Shifty had the first Afrikaans punk, the first black rock n rollers, the first African Fusion Protest Poetry and then me. I was the first dude to cut up tapes and use avant-garde shit with contemporary Lee Scratch Perry studio techniques on Afrikaans radio-political-speech-crazy-ass-punk ‘do it yourself’ mentality. YOUR NEW ALBUM ARTWORK IS ONE OF YOUR COLLAGE WORKS CREATED IN THE EARLY 80s, WHILE YOU CREATED THIS WERE YOU CONSCIOUSLY AWARE OF THE CONCEPTUAL RELEVANCE AND DUALISM IT HAD RELATING TO THE RISE OF SUPER CONSUMERISM WITH TYRE CHANGING OF CARS AND THE BURNING OF TYRES IN TOWNSHIPS? Artists often haven’t a clue as to what they are doing. Critics (good critics) often make sense of the works that come out of the zeitgeist, out of the soul of the times, and give the layman an inside track, an understanding where there was none. I used to have a recurring dream, from which this image sprang, but I didn’t recognise it until the work was done.

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KALAHARI SURFERS RETRO ACTIVE FUTURISTIC POST APOCALYPTIC CUT AND PASTE PUNK

Kalahari Surfers Beat About The Bush 1981 Pure Freude

Kalahari Surfers Own Affairs 1984 Shifty

Kalahari Surfers Living In The Heart Of The Beast 1985 Shifty

Kalahari Surfers Sleep Armed 1988 Shifty

kalahari surfers bigger than jesus 1989 Shifty Kalahari Surfers Tropical Barbie Hawaiian Surf Set 2014 Angry Africa Records Roastin Records

TRAILER TRASH LLOYD ROSS COLE / SHIFTY RECORDS QUESTIONS - HEIN COETZEE

IMAGES - SUPPLIED

“A good example of a Shifty album banned from both possession and distribution however, would be Mzakhe Mbuli’s ‘Change is Pain’, which ironically went on to be our biggest seller. The way we circumvented the ban was to produce blank label copies of the album on cassette and distribute it through a network of bicycle shops.” WHERE DID THE NAME SHIFTY COME FROM? We decided to house the studio in a caravan and we were looking for an offbeat name that would indicate the lack of necessity for a fixed address, as well as the ability to move between things both physically and in terms of ideas. We used Thesaurus but didn’t fancy “caprice”, so Shifty it was. WHAT WAS THE FIRST SHIFTY RELEASE AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE THIS AS YOUR FIRST LP? That was called Sankomota and why is a good question, because after all, I was schooled in the punk and new wave scene and Sankomota certainly didn’t have those roots. But, I really liked the roots they did have, which was Africa & rock, resulting in a sweet and unique sound. Besides, they were in a very tricky situation with having been banned from SA. Basically exiled in Lesotho, the only country in the world completely surrounded by another country, with barely a loti to rub together. THERE WERE RUMOURS THAT THE FIRST LEG OF SHIFTY WAS BANKROLLED BY THE VYFSTER SCORE. IS THIS TRUE? IF SO, HOW DID IT HAPPEN? Well, yes and no. I bankrolled the early Shifty productions from money I earned working in the local film industry. While doing location sound on Vyfster I heard that the person commissioned to compose the score didn’t deliver, so I offered my services and wrote the music for the series. The subsequent “hit” wasn’t really a huge money-spinner for me however, as I got a taste, or should I rather say distaste for the way the local music industry worked. The kak royalties that I initially received were mostly kept by the lawyers.

IN FRAME - “MORE FIRE!” - JAMES PHILIPS / BERNOLDUS NIEMND

YOU STARTED UP AS AN ALTERNATIVE RECORD LABEL THAT PRODUCED RECORDS IN A MORE AFFORDABLE WAY FOR MUSICIANS THAT WERE NORMALLY FROWNED UPON OR WHO FOUND IT DIFFICULT TO GET RECORD DEALS IN THEIR PUNK/ROCK/NEW WAVE GENRES. HOW DID SHIFTY LATER BECOME SUCH A STRONG ANTI-POLITICAL INSTITUTION? I’m not sure I understand this question properly…I presume you are meaning “anti-apartheid institution”, or “political institution”? If so, then no, Shifty was certainly not in any way a political institution. We were a record company, but a record company that was out looking for vital, original South African music to work with. It just so happened that South Africa was in one hell of a mess politically, so consequently a lot of the artists that I thought were vital and original were producing music about what was happening in the country. DID ANY OF THE SHIFTY RELEASES GET BANNED BY THE OLD GOVERNMENT? IF SO, HOW DID YOU WORK AROUND IT? There were a number of forms of effective censorship back then, starting with the industry itself. Apart from the fact that many of the artists that ended up recording with Shifty could not get a deal with bigger companies because of their lyrical content. 24

We actually had the only cutting engineer in the country refuse to finish cutting ‘Own Affairs’ by the Kalahari Surfers and ‘The Happy Ships’, our 2nd and third releases, because he didn’t like the content. I kid you not. Then a good number of Shifty artists were essentially banned from airplay, the buck stopping at the SABC. Then, as now, the national broadcaster was the mouthpiece of the government. Releases actually banned and gazetted by the government were fewer, but with the industry and broadcaster on their side they didn’t need to sweat too much with most of our releases. A good example of a Shifty album banned from both possession and distribution however, would be Mzakhe Mbuli’s ‘Change is Pain’, which ironically went on to be our biggest seller. The way we circumvented the ban was to produce blank label copies of the album on cassette and distribute it through a network of bicycle shops. WAS IT DIFFICULT TO RUN THE SHIFTY STUDIO INSIDE OF A CARAVAN IN THE HEART OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID DILEMMA? No, every day was another adventure, which made for an exciting existence. WHAT WAS THE MOST DIFFICULT ALBUM TO PRODUCE UNDER THE SHIFTY CATALOGUE? The Cherry Faced Lurchers’ ‘Other White Album’. James Phillips, the frontman of the band was going through a lengthy period of difficulties typically associated with the rock and roll lifestyle. I think we tried putting down the lead vocal on a number of separate occasions over a period of three years and still didn’t really crack it. UP UNTIL TODAY, WHICH ALBUM SOLD THE MOST UNITS IN THE COMMERCIAL REALM AND HOW WAS IT DISTRIBUTED? ‘Change is Pain’, as described earlier. ‘Eet Kreef’ by the Gereformeerde Blues Band would come in as a close second. This was distributed through more traditional channels, though the promotion of the album was pretty unique. During the Voelvry Tour, the bands managed to get banned from pretty much all the campuses they were booked to play at, resulting in the most fabulous publicity.

IN SEPTEMBER THERE WAS A SHIFTY MONTH IN JOHANNESBURG, SHOWCASING THE SHIFTY HERITAGE AND A CONCERT REUNITING SOME OF THE MUSICIANS. THIS EVENT WAS SPONSORED BY THE ALLIANCE FRANCAISE, WOULD YOU SAY THAT THE GOVERNMENT IS STILL NOT PROVIDING THE NECESSARY FUNDS AND SPONSORSHIP FOR CULTURE AND HERITAGE IN SOUTH AFRICA? The Shifty Heritage month was sponsored by a lot of organisations, not just the Alliance. Although, their input was essential, being the venue of all the activities of the month, barring the main event at the Bassline. The South African History Archive, another essential partner in making the month into the success it was, did apply to the Department of Arts and Culture for funding. Though a small amount was eventually received, they didn’t let SAHA know how much or when it would be paid over, so we were really kept guessing most of the way through the month. I’M A BIG FAN OF JAMES PHILLIPS, ESPECIALLY HIS ALTER EGO BERNOLDUS NIEMAND, I HEAR THAT THE FUNDS GENERATED FROM THE SHIFTY MONTH WILL GO TOWARDS PRODUCING THE LOST ALBUM OF BERNOLDUS NIEMAND ‘THE OTHER WHITE ALBUM’. IS THIS TRUE? Firstly, pretty much all of the funds generated by Shifty September were gobbled up by Shifty September, so there is not really budget left over to begin another project anytime soon. But yes, it is an ambition of mine to finally get happy with ‘The Other White Album’, so I will busy myself sometime with the re-re-re-remixing of it…maybe for the 20th anniversary of James’ passing in July 2015. JOHANNES KERKORREL AND BERNOLDUS NIEMAND ARE NOT WITH US ANYMORE, SOME MIGHT SAY THAT THEY WERE THE TRUE VOICES OF THE VOELVRY MOVEMENT, DO YOU THINK THERE ARE STILL MUSICIANS IN THIS DAY AND AGE THAT FIGHT FOR THE SOUL OF SOUTH AFRICA? It depends which soul you are talking about. When I go to festivals like Oppikoppi, I am always pleasantly surprised with the quality of local songwriting and performance, so I think that the soul of SA popular music is alive and well. If you are talking about the soul of SA protest music however, it’s pretty damn

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sick. I would say that there is almost as much reason to be writing songs about how our country is being “led” now, as there was back in the dark days of apartheid. What is going on now is an outrage and there are too few of our musicians that appear to be outraged in song. RECENTLY, THE SHIFTY CATALOGUE HAS REACHED CULT STATUS, ESPECIALLY IN THE LP AND CASSETTE FORMANT, OCCASIONALLY STIRRING UP BIDDING WARS ONLINE. DO YOU STILL HAVE A COPY OF EACH OF THE LPs AND CASSETTES? I have a copy of most of the albums I produced… there are one or two that are annoyingly absent however. THERE ARE NUMEROUS PHOTOS AND ARCHIVAL FOOTAGE OF THE MOVEMENT, WHICH PHOTO WOULD YOU SAY BRINGS UP AN ACCURATE FEEL OF THE 1980s PERIOD OF SHIFTY? Now there’s a question. The problem with giving a singular answer is that the Shifty catalogue of artists was so blimmin’ diverse. So take your pick… Johannes Kerkorrel in rose-tinted goggles, Mzakhe under a electricity pylon, Jennifer Ferguson hammering out a number with her flaming mane, Sankomota backdropped by the mountains of Lesotho, etc. YOU ARE NOW A DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKER TRAVELING ALL AROUND AFRICA AND CAPTURING SOME OF THE MOST INTERESTING STORIES AND PERSPECTIVES. WHAT IS YOUR NEXT BIG PROJECT? Last year I completed a film about two local boys that designed and built their own aircraft and flew it around the world. I am currently working with them on a pilot for a series about discovering the continent of their birth through their enthusiasm for adventure and the acquiring of knowledge. File under thrills for the thinking person. WILL SHIFTY RELEASE ANYTHING SOON? You know, I do get itchy palms every now and again, but with the four months that I spent on Shifty this year being uncannily analogous with the way it was back in the day (i.e. complete obsession, no pay), I have to do some real work for a while to earn my kids’ school fees for next year. Besides, I have learnt that the only way to approach the act of recording the music I love from this country is to never imagine it’s is going to make you rich. WHAT ARE YOUR 5 FAVOURITE ALBUMS THAT CAME OUT RECENTLY? I have never been one for this kind question because I’m not at all up with what’s going on and so I don’t want to embarrass myself. In fact, even when I was running Shifty full-time I never had a record collection to speak of. Some local female singers have caught my ear though, like Sannie Fox and Nechama Brody. Oh and watch out for my girlfriend’s daughter, Alice Phoebe-Lou, she’s riding some kind of fresh and wild horse through people’s hearts.

SHIFTY CLASSICS VOELVRY COMPILATION 1986 SHIFTY

Bernoldus Niemand HOU MY VAS KORPERAAL 7” SINGLE 1983 SHIFTY Bernoldus Niemand WIE IS Bernoldus Niemand? 984 SHIFTY

naaimasjiene Die Saai Lewe 1989 SHIFTY

FOSATU WORKER CHOIRS FOSATU WORKER CHOIRS 1986 SHIFTY

Cherry Faced Lurchers Live At Jamesons 1984 SHIFTY

illegal gathering illegal gathering 1986 SHIFTY

mzwakhe change is pain 1987 SHIFTY

sankomota sankomota 1983 SHIFTY THE LAKE

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SIMON & MARY DEAN POZNIAK / milliner QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

ART DIRECTION / STYLING - JANA & KOOS

PHOTOGRAPHY - Nico Krijno

“Something that I love about this business is the history it has to it. When researching all these different hats you find yourself reading articles that were based decades (even centuries) ago. Due to the fact that we are a hat factory, my inspiration comes mostly from gaining knowledge on the old shapes.”

I had always grown up with an unusual love for hats. It was obvious because my father worked in a hat factory. Growing up as a kid I would come to the factory and spend days here running around having fun. During my time in high school I always knew in the back of my mind that I would join the business. I attempted studies in sound engineering and writing, but came to the conclusion that these are my hobbies and the hat factory was always going to become my future. CAN YOU GIVE US SOME INSIGHT INTO THE HISTORY OF THE FACTORY AND YOUR FAMILY’S INVOLVEMENT WITHIN MILLINERY CULTURE? Simon and Mary is a heritage brand established in 1935. The hat roots were first planted in South Africa when Mordechai Pozniak (Simon’s father) brought his cap factory from Poland to Johannesburg. Simon Pozniak eventually took the leading role in the company and grew it into one of Africa’s most renowned wool felt hat manufacturing plants. Simon’s wife Leah (whom he lovingly coined Mary after reading a novel) joined the business, working alongside Simon and attending to all non-manufacturing needs. In 1973, Simon’s youngest son, Julian, eagerly entered the family business and Robert his oldest son joined in 1988. Dean entered the business in 2008, a fourth generation Pozniak. He heads the brand and factory with the aim of continuing the legacy created by Simon. SINCE THE BRAND WAS ESTABLISHED IN 1935, FASHION AND TRENDS HAVE CHANGED DRAMATICALLY, A TREND CAN LOSE FAVOUR OVERNIGHT IN THE UNPREDICTABLE TANTRUMS OF THE FASHION INDUSTRY. WHICH PERIODS THROUGH TIME HAVE PROVEN TO BE MOST LUCRATIVE IN MILLINERY PRODUCTION? Talking from personal experience and as well as conversations with my old man, our most lucrative period was throughout the 80s. We were the biggest exporters of woolen felt hoods, the raw material needed to make the hat. Eventually, China caught up and started producing the raw material, this caused us to have to change with the times and adapt. WITH ALL THE ORIGINAL MACHINERY WHICH WAS PURCHASED IN THE 60S IN ITALY STILL IN WORKING ORDER, THE WORKSHOP SEEMS TO BE A FULLY FUNCTIONING TIME MACHINE. ARE THERE A LOT OF MAINTENANCE COSTS INVOLVED IN KEEPING ALL OF THESE VINTAGE MACHINES RUNNING? What I love about all of our old machines is how strong they are. Back in the day things were made to last and these machines are testaments. We rarely have issues with our old machines but maintenance once a year helps with any hiccups.

DID THE BRAND EVER TRY AND INFILTRATE CERTAIN MODERN TRENDS, LIKE SAY FOR INSTANCE IN THE 80s AND 90s MANUFACTURING BASEBALL CAPS TO FIT IT WITH THE TRENDS OF HEADWEAR AT THE TIME? The brand was only launched earlier this year. The factory is called ‘Supreme Hat and Cap Manufacturers’ and ‘Simon and Mary’ is a brand that I have awoken, basing it on the factory’s history and heritage. In the past we made hats for brands such as Dobbs and Stetson, but we were also a cap factory at that time. Making caps for the branded sports teams from around the world, as well as a lot of local brands. AS THE TRADITIONAL MILLINERY TRENDS STARTED TO PICK UP AGAIN, HOW DID YOU GO ABOUT DECIDING WHAT ROUTE TO TAKE WITH THE NEW LINE OF HEADWEAR YOU DECIDED TO RELEASE, TO RE-ESTABLISH THE BRAND? There are only a limited number of hat silhouettes in the world. We are lucky enough to have most of these silhouette blocks to work with and for me the next step was to alter the finishes, giving them a more modern look. Using all of this I have brought a young creative aspect to the factory whereby I am using our old machinery, but adding a modern day twist to the finishes of the hats. THE COMPANY WAS SOMEWHAT OF AN AMBASSADOR TO SHOWCASE MILLENARY SKILLS AT THE LEGENDARY BREAD AND BUTTER SHOW IN BERLIN EARLIER THIS YEAR. WHAT PROCESS DID YOU FOLLOW TO GET INVOLVED IN THE SHOW AND WILL YOU BE EXHIBITING MORE OF YOUR WORK THERE IN 2015? We were lucky enough to meet Joey from Bread and Butter while he was down for STR.CRD last year. He loved the product and the brand and was keen to get us overseas. We ended up making the hats for the staff outfits as well as showcasing at the show. We had limited time to get everything ready for the show but we pulled it off, working with Jana and Koos as well as Gareth Place, and my sister Aimee Pozniak. THE BRAND HAS CHOSEN TO WORK VERY CLOSELY WITH THE CREATIVE DUO JANA AND KOOS. HOW DID YOU MAKE THE CONNECTION WITH THEM AND WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO WORK WITH THEM? When the idea of Simon and Mary came to me,

Jana and Koos were highly recommended by a good friend. After a few meetings they presented their work to me for the brand, and we were all blown away. We are very happy to be working with the talented duo and look forward to many more years with them. AT ABOUT WHAT PERIOD DID YOU FIND THE TREND FOR WEARING STYLISH HEADWEAR STARTED TO APPEAR AGAIN WITHIN STREET CULTURE AND WHERE DO YOU THINK IT STEMS FROM HERE IN SOUTH AFRICA? The trend has been creeping back in on an international level for the past few years. The customer my grandfather used to supply was your old school gentleman wearing his suit and tie. These days the customer is a lot broader and allows the hats to be worn in a more street level kind of way. With social media making the world so small it has allowed us to follow international trendsetters and watch them daily. This has bought trends closer to home and has allowed easier access in gaining the ‘fashion advantage’. THE LATEST RANGE HAS BOASTED WITH A VERY BRIGHT AND COLOURFUL LINE OF FELT AND VERY INTERESTING SHAPES LIKE THE COLONIAL PITH HELMET. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT RESEARCHING A PARTICULAR STYLE OF HAT AND PREDICT HOW IT WOULD FIT INTO A MODERN MOVEMENT? Something that I love about this business is the history it has to it. When researching all these different hats you find yourself reading articles that were based decades (even centuries) ago. Due to the fact that we are a hat factory, my inspiration comes mostly from gaining knowledge on the old shapes (silhouettes). The next step is making sure the hat is relevant in our times and then putting our own finishes to it. It would be impossible to tell as they are all still in use and are spread out evenly. HATS TODAY DO NOT REPRESENT STATUS THE WAY THAT THEY USED TO. WEARING A HAT FOR ITS NATURAL PURPOSE (PROTECTION OF THE HEAD) WAS RESERVED TO THOSE OF THE LOWER WORKING CLASS. PEASANTS WERE NOT ALLOWED TO WEAR HATS UNTIL THE END OF THE 17THCENTURY, WHEN THEY WERE ALLOWED ONLY TO WEAR HOODS AND PROTECTIVE HATS. WHAT

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WOULD YOU SAY WEARING A HAT THESE DAYS REPRESENTS TO MODERN SOCIETY? As you have said, back in the day hats represented class and stature in society. You’ll see in all movies based in the old days, the guys wearing the high, large top hats are normally noted as more important. Today it is more of a fashion item, not purchased for stature. I’m confident to say that they are purchased for look rather than protection in most cases. ARE YOU AWARE OF ANY OTHER ACTIVE MILLENARY FACTORIES DOING ANYTHING SIMILAR IN AFRICA AT THE MOMENT? No. WHERE DO YOU ACQUIRE THE FELT AND MATERIALS USED TO MANUFACTURE THE HATS FROM AND CAN YOU EXPLAIN A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF HOW A HAT IS MANUFACTURED IN THE FACTORY? We acquire the felt from both Bolivia and China. We do the rest in our factory. There are many steps involved in making a hat in our factory. We still make them the old school way which requires many steps. In short, we block the hood for size and brim width. We then press the hood for crown shape, in the next step the brim gets cut to size. From there we do all the ‘accessories’ (lining, sweat band, ribbon, pin etc). Once this is complete then the hat goes and gets sandbagged, this gives the brim its shape. There are some other processes involved in making some of the other hats, but the above is just your basic outline. SURELY THERE IS NEW EQUIPMENT AND MACHINERY AVAILABLE TO MANUFACTURE THE TYPE OF HEADWEAR THAT YOU DO? WHY HAVE YOU CHOSEN NOT TO ‘UPGRADE’ THE FACTORY IN A SENSE? If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. HOW MANY STAFF MEMBERS ARE WORKING WITHIN THE FACTORY AND THE COMPANY AT THE MOMENT? We have about 50 staff members and most of them have been here for over 25 years. HAS THE FACTORY MANAGED TO KEEP AN ARCHIVE OF THE HATS THROUGH THE YEARS, DO YOU SEE HAT COLLECTING BECOMING AS POPULAR AS SNEAKER HEADS COLLECTING VINTAGE AND LIMITED EDITION SNEAKERS, IN THE FUTURE? I always find old and interesting things lying around from the past. I managed to find images taken for a catalogue in the late 80s a few months back, in the factory. WHAT CAN WE EXPECT FROM SIMON AND MARY IN THE FUTURE? You can expect lots and lots of hats. We will be having a pop-up in Cape Town at the end of November with some other great brands. Other than that we are currently working on a new range that will all be revealed next year. One step at a time. 27

IN FRAME - SIMON POZNIAK

TAKING THE LINEAGE OF THE SIMON AND MARY BRAND, WAS IT A CONSCIOUS DECISION TO FOLLOW IN THE FAMILY’S FOOTSTEPS OR WERE THERE ANY OTHER AREAS YOU WERE INTERESTED IN TO SCULPT A CAREER FOR YOURSELF?

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Pandora NIKHIL SINGH / witchboy QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - HAYDEN PHIPPS

“I generally avoid definitions, preferring to grow like a stain behind things, in dark corners, under beds…etc. One day a person might look up and notice me. Dressed as a clown or something ridiculous. I’ll simply be ‘there’ - loitering in the background - an undefined problem, something that should probably be dealt with . ” HOW WOULD YOU INTRODUCE YOURSELF, WHAT YOU DO AND WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE IN? I generally avoid definitions, preferring to grow like a stain behind things, in dark corners, under beds… etc. One day a person might look up and notice me. Dressed as a clown or something ridiculous. I’ll simply be ‘there’ - loitering in the background - an undefined problem, something that should probably be dealt with. I’ve never been a ‘hi, this is me’ kind of person. I haven’t really been a person. More of an ‘invisible’, an imaginary friend. As far as belief’s go - I believe in many kaleidoscopic things. My investigations into the supernatural and uncanny have painted me into a few dark corners. I’ve been attacked by a succubus, invoked fairies and travelled to their realm, met the devil and peter pan (it’s complicated), had a problem with a poltergeist once (I had to move), been approached by more than a few witchdoctor types asking to take me on as their apprentice. All in all I prefer cartoons and weekends by the beach. I have too many plots to hatch to consider a life in the ‘secret service’. Many great secret shows. I do believe that their are forces at work on this planet that many would like to call ‘extraterrestrial’, but when you make a closer study and become involved you start to see these things as something ‘other’, more ancient, in fact NOT EXTRATERRESTRIAL AT ALL. They are a part of our ‘heritage’ and I have come to believe that we are more familiar with them than we would like to imagine… That being said, I believe we have serious problems in the way we conduct ourselves as a species, simply in terms of resource management, etc. Veganism is something you can actually do to change your carbon footprint and impact on the environment. Whether it’s to your taste or not, it makes a difference. The argument that we are entitled to something simply because it’s delicious is really what got us into this mess in the first place. Nobody is saying your bacon isn’t tasty. We are just saying that you can’t afford it anymore. It’s part of the nature of sacrifice, to be able to give up something you love for the greater good. I believe that the responsibility is ours, to alter our lifestyles immediately to avoid completely annihilating ourselves. If it DOES come to utter destruction, I really want to be healthy enough to have ringside seats and use the opportunity to stride around with a machete, blasting ‘Fields of the Nephilim’, decapitating ‘half crocodile, half human’ mutants or something (not that I listen to ‘Fields of the Nephilim’ anymore). YOU RECENTLY WROTE AND FILMED A FULL-LENGTH FILM CALLED ‘TRILLZONE’ IN ABOUT A MONTH, WITHOUT ANY BUDGET. WHAT WAS THE IDEA BEHIND DOING THE FILM, WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE ON SUCH A MAMMOTH PROJECT AND TO DO IT IN SUCH A SHORT TIME? Well, Trevor Steele-Taylor got hold of me two weeks before the Grahamstown Festival and mentioned that Lauren Beukes had dropped out of the JG Ballard symposium and would I like to take her place

and give a talk on Ballard, etc? I was like, sure. He then mentioned that all the other participants were screening ‘Ballardian’ movies they had made and would I like to make one as well? I was like, sure. What turned into a plan for a twelve minute short, grew into an hour long ‘beginning of a feature’, which I screened at the festival. I finished editing in the car ride up to the symposium. Cedric Sundstrom (the director of the American Ninja movies) was driving like a bat out of hell and there was no sleep to be had. It was an adventure! After watching the picture, Cedric and Trevor suggested that I add more sex and make it into a full-length feature. I radioed my team (Justin Allart, Lise Slabber, Robert Scholz and Niklas Wittenberg) about it. They were super-keen. So I returned and we finished the whole movie (99mins) from scratch in July (2014). We started July 1 and had it up on Vimeo on the last day of July. So yeah, none of us really knew that we would be making a movie. It kind of just happened. Like catching a cold. Once you have the symptoms and it kicks in, you just have to deal with it. So we did. We had so much fun that we are planning another one as soon as my book deadline is out the way… I HAVE FOUND A NUMBER OF USES FOR THE WORD ‘TRILL’, LIKE COMPUTER TERMS WHERE TRILL MEANS “TRANSPARENT INTERCONNECTION OF LOTS OF LINKS”. IT ALSO HAS A MUSICAL CONNECTION, WHERE IT IS USED TO DESCRIBE RAPID ALTERNATION BETWEEN TWO ADJACENT NOTES THAT BIRDS OR INSECTS SING OR UTTER IN A SUCCESSION OF RAPIDLY ALTERNATING SOUNDS. WOULD YOU RELATE THE FLOW OF EVENTS IN THE FILM TO COINCIDE WITH THE TITLE OR WHERE DID THE TITLE ORIGINATE? I was very influenced by Neil Jordan’s early movies: Angel, Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, The Company of Wolves, etc. With Trill I wanted to create a character STRAIGHT OUT OF an early Neil Jordan picture. Vaguely unreal, like a fairy or an elf that’s forced to live an everyday existence, androgynous, in a natural and almost delusional way. Trill becomes the key to the magical kingdom for Lise’s character, a sort of harbinger. It doesn’t really matter where Trill goes. I mean where was she/he anyway? I wanted to reference every aspect related to the word Trill. For example, the soundtrack is full of bird trills. In hiphop culture it is a combination of the words ‘true’ and ‘real’. Also, The Trills from Star Trek were always my favourite aliens, in that they are kind of dual beings. So yeah - Trill. I think when Trill named his/her page ‘Trill Zone’ it was just because of the hip-hop music she had been listening to. She just thought it was cool because she is so ghetto. Lise’s character sees this name and mythologises it into a whole realm, which she then becomes lost in. However, Trill is also kind of a ‘dumb blonde’ because he/she is, in terms of the narrative, the ‘mystery woman’ in the film noir aspect: the strange, cigarette-smoking lady, who leads the protagonist (Lise) astray. Although, I obviously wanted to mix it up and have weird transferences between the two, like Lise has the cigarette-smoking mystery lady look, but is actually the drunk detective. So I wanted to get all this in with Trill. I interacted with many people in real life, as the character. I made a study of Stanislavsky-based acting at one point in my past (my old Playhouse days)

and have been into ‘method’ techniques ever since. I see them as ‘Castaneda-esque’. FROM WHAT I GATHERED, A LOT OF THE SCRIPT WAS ADAPTED AS YOU WENT ALONG WITH THE FILM. HOW MUCH OF THE ORIGINAL WAS LEFT OVER IN THE END AND WHERE DID YOU DRAW INSPIRATION FROM WHEN YOU STARTED THE WRITING PROCESS? Well, it’s sort of how I work with everything. I like a very clear-cut foundation and then I like to riff off that and go in weird, unanticipated directions. My ‘shadow people’ (Justin, Lise and Niklas) are all multi-talented artists in their own right. We figured that we could ‘wing it’ with what we had and so we did. The story came out of what we imagined was a deeper layer of Cape Town, both oblique and familiar. Many people see Cape Town in a very specific light, particularly in Cape Town, we wanted to sort of draw back a veil and see the city anew and explore more taboo issues. We wanted to capture the mountain more as a constant, oppressive presence - stuff like that. We basically adapted everything to what we could do without too much effort. We are all good friends so everything was one massive party from start to finish. We decided, well fuck the prescribed ‘industry’ way of doing things. We love films, let’s make one as ‘mad artists’. No one was really in charge and we delineated tasks. Justin was the camera guy, but Lise filmed parts on her phone and by me on my laptop. I was the writer, but portions were improvised. We just kind of treated each scene/shoot as a separate thing and rewrote the rulebook every day, always keeping the narrative in mind. I found the film following the usual course of things I write, it sort of became like a dream, which events and people encrusted around like a coral reef. Once completed, it resembles ‘one holistic natural organism’, but it is really the process of thousands of moments of individual growth. I never went to university or art school. I never even finished high school. I don’t subscribe to any prescribed ‘way of doing things’. I basically detest the way people are forced to explain and categorise creative method in institutions of ‘higher burning’. I believe in chaos. I believe that the only good school is one that has been burned to the ground. Perhaps I am being melodramatic here because I do love old school buildings. They are so great as sets in horror movies. I really have no idea how I work, I just do. I always plan to have as much fun working as possible. I don’t believe a person should suffer for art. In fact, it should be quite the opposite. I also see it as a character flaw to live out fantasies through art. I believe fantasies should be acted out ‘with the safety off’, not explored safely through an artistic medium. The experience gleaned from a fantasy can be fertile soil for creative expression. To say something was ‘left over’ would be a fallacy. It was what it was from start to finish and never deviated from its natural course of gestation at any point. YOU CHOSE A VERY RAW APPROACH TO MAKE THE FILM, DOING ONLY ONE TAKE ON MOST OF THE SCENES AND BASICALLY ADAPTING TO ALL THE SITUATIONS AND ENVIRONMENTS THAT YOU CHOSE TO PLACE THE ACTORS IN. CAN YOU ELABORATE ON THAT?

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I like being immersed in another world when I watch a film. I favour a slower pace. I also feel that it is possible to convey plot shifts in more elliptical ways. I don’t like over-explaining anything. I believe that emotional changes can be evoked through atmospheric devices. For example, in the couch scene the one-angle shot and slow pacing reveals the banality (and security/charm) of their domestic existence, life in a gilded cage, you begin to feel how trapped Lise’s character is in there. The fast cuts to the phone text show a hint of another world and prompt her to rise and shout (which is cut to hint that the rebellion of her action is carried through to the next scene). We then shift to dramatic gliding movement into town (another world) and an emerging soundtrack to open up the new world. Basically, this area is actually narrative driven and provides a major plot shift, although it is delivered subconsciously and ‘felt’ rather than discussed. DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTERS AND ACTORS IN THE SAME SPONTANEOUS WAY? Well, no. The characters came out of the story, which was crafted around the people I knew who could carry it. It’s a sort of testimony to a facet of Cape Town, which I think people generally ignore, avoid or have never seen. Fortunately, I was lucky enough to be friends with people like Lise, Niklas, Bingo and Rob Scholz (whom I last directed in a school play). For example, Lise is a uniquely gifted actress. She manages to balance the technical necessities of acting whilst at the same time maintaining a fresh, completely naturalistic live quality and it’s on tap with her. Once she understands a concept, and she is remarkably quick, then she just does it and usually does so perfectly. She works in a casting agency as well (along with her regular stint on Black Sails) and is also very mindful of the technical side of performances. I would say that I actually built most of the film on her performances rather than the other way around. In the same way that I edited to the haunting piano score that Niklas produced. Rather than trying to fit sound to the visuals, I let the music establish a pace and let the plot encrust around it (like a coral reef). It affects the entire pacing of the film and gives it a sort of dreamy, introspective air. Events also tend to circulate in dream logic, coming out of random details and spiraling into harshness and then back to buoyancy very quickly. WHAT HAS THE REACTION TO THE FILM BEEN SO FAR AND ARE YOU PLANNING ON TAKING ON ANOTHER PROJECT IN A SIMILAR VEIN ANY TIME SOON? It was received well at Grahamstown and showed at the Celludroid Sci-Fi Fest at Labia, alongside an early screening of Jeff Paltrow’s ‘The Young Ones’. Now it has been accepted into the Bangladesh International Independent Film Festival. I’ve sent it out to some other festivals too, the day before yesterday actually. I’ve been busy. We’ll see what happens. The idea is not to focus on promotion too much, but to do more films. As many more as we can. Right now we have a couple of ideas we are developing and would like to shoot in summer. The same team with the same budget (nil). 31

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RUMOUR HAS IT THAT YOU FIRST CAME TO CAPE TOWN TO COLLABORATE WITH WADDY JONES (NINJA FROM DIE ANTWOORD) AND APPARENTLY EVEN DID A FEW SHOWS WITH HIM BACK THEN? I hitchhiked to Cape Town in the 90s to go to raves and sleep on wine farms. I was very into ‘Crime and the City Solution’ at the time, those were the first Cape times for me I think. The second run was in 2001 as a ‘psychic detective’. I was working as a fortune-teller, here and in Europe. I was basically wandering the earth in a white suit. That time around I stayed in a huge and weird old red house in Bo Kaap. I got locked in the museum overnight, which was interesting. Then sometime in 2003, after being in Europe for about a year, my fiend Claire Angelique suggested I move in with Waddy because his girlfriend at the time had left and he needed a room-mate to make rent. Waddy and I lived together for a bit and I met Anri (now Yo-Landi), becoming quite good friends with her flat-mate Melani. At that time Waddy asked me to make some music for him and Anri to sing over, but I had just escaped from London and basically only had an acoustic guitar. We decided to collaborate on a comic type of thing instead, for the Constructus book. Anri used to come over a lot and I had no idea they were hooking up until I did a tarot reading for her and all these relationship cards started coming up for them. Strangely, I had a dream about her at that time, where I dreamt she was queen of this massive underground city of mutants and had this weird baby, with her face and a strange haircut. She was ‘freaked out’ by the mutants but the baby was in charge and barking commands at everyone, her included. I told her the next day, “wow you were like the queen of the dog people.” But I had forgotten details, like the haircut, etc. I forgot about it all for years and went back to Europe. When ‘Die Antwoord’ broke I saw a pic of them online and was like, “whoa, she has the same haircut as that baby in the dream.” Then it was like, “ok, so she finally became queen of the mutant dog people.” I did go on stage with them once, at the Bijou, but I was on mushrooms and I didn’t do much except vomit fake blood everywhere and sing “all you need is blood” over and over, with Waddy. It was a disaster, but a fun one. I remember Waddy being quite nervous in tennis gear and that I dragged Anri under the stage halfway through the performance because no one ever did a show from UNDER a stage. Luckily, she wasn’t on drugs and could get away easily. I was unfortunately irretrievably lost at sea from then on. So yeah, I wouldn’t exactly say I even did ONE show with them haha, more like I ran around like a chicken without a head or something. YOU FRONTED ONE OF SOUTH AFRICA’S MOST UNIQUE ALTERNATIVE BANDS CALLED ‘THE WILD EYES’. YOU GUYS MADE ONE GREAT ALBUM CALLED ‘OUR LOVE HAS A SPECIAL VIOLENCE’ IN 2007 – WHAT IS YOUR VERSION OF WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WILD EYES? I have no idea what happened. I emailed them in February 2012 to ask when we were practicing? They still haven’t replied. I’m as confused as you are. I KNOW A SECOND ALBUM WAS RECORDED BUT WAS NEVER RELEASED – DO YOU THINK THIS ALBUM WILL EVER BE RELEASED AND WOULD YOU BE PREPARED TO PLAY SOME SHOWS AGAIN? They kicked me out the band. I mean the ball is not exactly in my court. Actually, I have been trying to hook up this deal to release a Witchboy album with each copy of Taty Went West (UK/US edition). If it goes through there’s a chance of touring Witchboy stuff alongside the book tour in Europe and the US. I started thinking about putting together a live act and thought it could be a good chance to do something ‘old school-ish’ with Gareth and Len again (with Bat Blackk from Hi Spider drumming and Carmen doing vocals/synth). It would also give them a free/paid Tannhauser Gate tour as incentive. I messaged each of them saying I had a proposition but both were a bit weird. Len said, “you’re

playing some game with me.” Gareth was like, “I don’t come into town much.” So…I don’t know if anything will happen. I really just want to make and do stuff and have very little patience for badly written soap operas. DURING YOUR FIRST HIATUS FROM THE WILD EYES YOU LIVED IN LONDON FOR A WHILE AND WORKED ON YOUR FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL ‘SALEM BROWNSTONE’ WHICH WAS PUBLISHED BY WALKER BOOKS IN 2009. WERE YOU PLANNING ON DOING A GRAPHIC NOVEL AT THE TIME? Actually, your timeline is a bit off. I started working on Salem long before The Wild Eyes even formed. We just took so many breaks from it (John and I) that it became a seven-year itch. I have been on and off to London since I was two weeks old, so collectively I’ve lived in London more than I have actually lived in Cape Town. But yeah, with Salem it was very much a tribute to an old style of children’s book that I kind of dreamed about when I was a kid. Haunted houses, spooks and carny freaks, etc. YOU WORKED WITH THE AUTHOR JOHN HARRIS DUNNING, HOW DID YOU END UP COLLABORATING WITH HIM IN THE UK?

WILL ‘TATY WENT WEST’ BE TAKING ON THE SAME GOTHIC WORLD OF ‘SALEM BROWNSTONE’ OR WHAT CAN BE EXPECTED OF THE NEW BOOK AND WHEN WILL IT BE AVAILABLE? It comes out in 2015. I’ve written quite a few novels and ‘screamplays’ over the years, some are related. Taty is most certainly unrelated to Salem, which John wrote and I saw more as a kind of luxury pulpy item than a ‘novel’. TATY WENT WEST: Taty, a teenage runaway, embarks upon an adventure in the dinosaur-infested jungles of ‘The Outzone’. A necrotic wonderland of otherworldly mansions, robotic helpers, crumbling coastal cities and extraterrestrial vice quickly engulfs her. Aided and hindered in turns by the sociopathic imp, Alphonse Guava, Taty develops formidable telepathic powers. An invasion by inter-dimensional parasites throws the Outzone into chaos. Taty washes up at Paradise Discoteque – a mazy temple, overrun by colourful psychopaths. Here all her paranormal training finds its purpose in an ancient prophecy. She unlocks the hidden power of the mysterious floating pyramids and ascends into orbit...

SALEM BROWNSTONE

WHAT IS YOUR INVOLVEMENT WITH COCO CARBOMB?

We met via Simon Davis (Andy Davis’ brother), a mutual fiend who suggested we work together. John and I share a love for pulpy horror and retro comics, and ended up collaborating quite well. Indulging our obsessions with circuses and necromancy. In the end, we were living on the same street in Hampstead and much of that part of town crept into, and indeed overwhelmed, the universe of Salem Brownstone. So I would say we ended up collaborating through black magic, mostly.

Coco Carbomb is the nom de plume of Carmen Incarnadine. She has collaborated with almost everyone in the witch house scene at one time or another and has been a kind of witch house ‘it girl’ since 2010, when she was playing London with Neurotic Mass Movement. Since then she has appeared in the films of Mater Suspiria Vision, gigged alongside CRIMES, recorded with Curt Crackrach, Andrew Means of 3teeth, the Blam Lord, Party Trash, etc. We worked together on an alien jungle album called ‘SIAMESE INSIDE’, which was released on BLACK BVS records in 2013.

THE BOOK RECEIVED ACCOLADES FROM HARMONY KORINE, ALAN MOORE AND THE LATE ANTHONY MINGHELLA. HOW MANY OF THE BOOKS WERE PRINTED AND ARE THERE STILL ANY AVAILABLE OUT THERE? Salem actually received a pretty good deal, brokered by my incredibly sharp agent, Sarah Such. It came out in hardcover in the UK, Europe, parts of Scandinavia and Asia, by Walker Books. Then picked up by Candlewick in the US. It subsequently went into paperback in America in 2011. At that time, publisher’s weekly was calling Candlewick “the fastest growing children’s publisher in the US”, so Salem had a fantastic reach. There’s a copy of Salem in every major library in America! It had quite a massive run and was tipped as the first in a series. The folks at the publishing house were negotiating a second book when I had to leave the UK unexpectedly, because the visa laws changed. I missed my own book launch and mini-exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Toby Litt was the guest speaker. I was in Umhlanga at the time so I just sulked on the beach or something. YOU’RE CURRENTLY FINISHING UP YOUR SECOND GRAPHIC NOVEL TITLED ‘TATY WENT WEST’, WHICH IS BEING PUBLISHED BY KWANI. WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO TAKE ON BOTH THE WRITING AND ILLUSTRATION SIDE OF THE JOB THIS TIME? Actually, Taty is not a graphic novel and Kwani is not a publisher per se. Taty is the first book in a trilogy prose cycle and Kwani is a literary foundation spearheaded by the rather legendary Ellah Allfrey, the former senior editor at Jonothan Cape, Random house and 2013 chair of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Ellah is also the editor I am working closely with on Taty. Kwani was started as an initiative to draw literature from all over Africa by running a manuscript project dedicated to publishing new African voices. Taty was listed and selected for publication in their Pan-African series and I am the only South African in the series. The publication in Kwani is more a matter of literary prestige. A larger scale UK/US release will follow but I can’t really discuss that in print yet. Taty is also heavily illustrated, perhaps leading to confusion about it being a graphic novel.

with Radiohead when I met him. The band had him on a click for a whole gig, like a robot or something. He was like, “if we do this I need to cut loose!” So he invented a whole new style of drumming for himself, leading with his left hand and getting more chaotic and free. His signature sound, inspired by Mitch Mitchell, kind of paved the way for Hi Spider. We played a lot in London around 07/08. We even gigged with Charli XCX! Witchboy on the other hand is like a sort of lo-fi symphonic thing. Lo-fi because all Witchboy stuff is made on GarageBand and using keyboard shortcuts, no instruments except for the occasional guitar piece. I am generally against high-end equipment. I usually use only my laptop mic to capture voice and guitar with inbuilt patches and FX. Symphonic because it’s all about layering tracks in an orchestral fashion that is compositionally oriented for listening pleasure, as opposed to commercial enterprise. I wanted to create very complex arrangements and break as many rules as possible, while still referencing styles as diverse as post-rave and prog rock. I wanted to be as far away as possible from anything that would have the acronym EDM (Electronic Dance Music) attached. I guess I just became sick of EDM after living in Cape Town. That’s all people seem to produce here.

ARE ANY OF THESE ALBUMS SIGNED TO A LABEL AND WHERE SHOULD OUR READERS GO TO GET MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THEM? YOU’RE STILL VERY ACTIVE WITH QUITE A FEW OTHER MUSICAL SIDE PROJECTS, THERE IS ‘WITCHBOY’ THAT STEERS MORE TOWARDS A DARKER ELECTRONIC SIDE AND THEN ‘HI SPIDER’ WHICH IS VERY HEAVILY GUITAR DRIVEN. BOTH OF THESE PROJECTS ARE AT OPPOSITE ENDS OF THE MUSICAL SPECTRUM. DO YOU FIND IT DIFFICULT TO SWITCH FROM ONE TO THE OTHER? It’s all the same thing to me - Channeling. Hi Spider is actually more about complex rhythms. Bat Blackk (Alain Lotter) and I worked out a kind of musical relationship that allowed us to explore ‘handbrake’ speed changes. That is to say, once we were synched we could switch pacing almost telepathically and create very chaotic, though tight, grooves between drum/guitar and vocals, which shifted at a moment’s notice because it was just the two of us. Alain is one of the most gifted drummers I’ve ever worked with. He is able to balance technical ability with a supremely crazy edge. He had been drumming in a band called Seven Samurai, which toured

All witchboy stuff is through AURAL SECTS (album titles are: HOLLYMODE, APOCALIPSTICK, LE UNIVERSE PERVERSE, HAMPSTEAD TAPES, VENUSIAN NIGHTS). One album called ‘NARCOTIA’ was released on Phantasma Disques. As I mentioned previously, I may be re-releasing music recorded whilst writing with the Taty books, this will include re-mastered Witchboy and Coco Carbomb tracks. There’s also PRESSED UP BLACK and ROCK TOCK TICK, which I released on One Minute Trolley Dash and is floating around online. My SoundClown has all the stuff in-between and you can just search ‘Witchboy’. Songs will pop up like bodies in a river. IS THERE ANY HOPE LEFT FOR THE HUMAN RACE? Hope was the last creature out of Pandora’s box, arriving after a flood of demons, each more hideous and catastrophic than the next. Some choose to see this last creature as a final salvation. Others view hope as the most devastating monster of all. It’s a matter of perspective I guess.

WITCHBOY witchboy HOLLYMODE 2011 Aural Sects

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witchboy NARCOTIA 2012 Phantasma Disques

witchboy LE UNIVERSE PERVERSE 2012 Aural Sects

witchboy APOCALIPSTICK 2013

witchboy hampstead tapes 2013

Aural Sects

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ARIEL FOR SHIELA-MADGE BAKKER

Styling - KRISTI VLOK

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Makeup- MINKE DU PLESSIS

PHOTOGRAPHY - GABI LEE

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My War JAN HENRI BOOYENS QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - JACQUI VAN STADEN

“There is no narrative, political agenda or body politics. There is nothing I am trying to tell you, I am not trying to convince you on a cause or make you believe in anything. I think what I am trying to do is to make you feel.” AFTER YOUR DEBUT SOLO EXHIBITION THE MATT SPARKLE IN 2008, MARILYN MARTIN (FORMER DIRECTOR OF THE SA NATIONAL GALLERY) WROTE THAT YOUR WORKS WERE “UNASHAMEDLY MODERNIST IN INTENTION AND EXECUTION”. DO YOU THINK THAT THIS STATEMENT STILL APPLIES TO YOUR WORK TODAY? Yes I would say so. I think so. I am unashamedly modernist. I don’t work with a specific context. There is no narrative, political agenda or body politics. There is nothing I am trying to tell you, I am not trying to convince you on a cause or make you believe in anything. I think what I am trying to do is to make you feel. When one looks at the work you should understand it but you should not know why. It should be like a song you know, a melody that gets stuck in your head. For me it’s more about an emotional experience. For me it’s about the heart, I always like to think that I am a composer in a way. The work is very lyrical and very rhythmic. There is a beat to it. So yeah by all means I am a modernist, but I am not living in a modernist age anymore. We have so many different influences and I think that just by painting, that already has its own inherent context. Just me being a painter in South Africa and painting modernist pictures is incredibly weighted. Whether I say something or whether it’s already layered with agendas. YOU RECENTLY GOT FINED R3000 ON TWO SEPARATE OCCASIONS (WITHIN 5 MINUTES OF EACH OTHER) FOR DOING GRAFFITI SOMEWHERE IN DOWNTOWN CAPE TOWN. YOUR LINE WORK IS IMMEDIATELY RECOGNISABLE IN BARS, CUBICLES AND ON RESIDENTIAL WALLS. WHAT DRAWS YOU TO EXPRESS YOUR MEDIUM ON THE STREETS THESE DAYS? I have been doing street art since I was in high school but no one has really known up until now. I never had a name or added a name to it. I did not want to be like a street artist, it was just something I love doing. I am very neurotically creative. Those lines actually have an interesting story. That comes from a Tarot card that depicts death riding a horse and carrying a black flag that contains a crimson rose, that line or squiggle is based on that rose on the flag that death is carrying. I got completely obsessed with the idea of death as a subject when I was doing a residency in Basel. I saw all of Jan van Eyck’s paintings and etchings and I did a lot of research into this. Death comes for everyone. Not even the king is safe from it. So I came across the death Tarot card with the crimson rose on the flag. The black flag is so symbolic in my life. It plays such a big part in my life and I even have a tattoo of it on my arm. A black flag is an anarchy symbol, a symbol of no state. It’s a punk icon and I can relate to that, coming from how I grew up with a very punk mentality. My sensibilities are very punk and anarchic. I’m very much against the status quo. Fuck authority. So that’s also why I sketch on walls because it’s part of the sub culture and that squiggle comes from that rose on the flag. The card itself also means ‘second chance’ or ‘new beginnings’. It’s not necessarily about death but about hope, which has a big meaning for me in my life. I’m attempting a second chance or new beginning. So within the line work there is a flow, a rhythm and a pattern to it. It almost becomes like a Buddhist mantra.

HOW MUCH DOES YOUR INTERACTION WITH SOCIETY INFLUENCE YOUR WORK? When you walk around instead of driving you get to see a lot more details and you get to know the guys in the street. I can go anywhere in the city and be recognised by someone, most guys call me “whitey” and I have a bunch of gang affiliations. I happened to make quite a bit of a name for myself a while back when I was looking into the darker side of society and exploring a bit of the underground. I was drawn into this gang culture so I feel very safe wherever I go because I am a witness, a solid guy. I can vouch for it. My work comes from a very emotional place and walking the streets you realise how desperate our society really is and how fucked up and sick most people are, that obviously influences me. My work is like an outlet for all this emotion that is pressed up inside. It just builds up and then it becomes a release, I feel quite exhausted after I have done a big piece. It comes from an emotional place and I also want it to communicate what I’m feeling, I want it to reflect or mirror that. I’m not sure if I always get it right but I think I do because people do respond to it. Maybe not as intensely as I experienced it but there is definitely a resonance. My work is not always ‘Super Emo’ but it is pretty fucked. YOUR WORK SEEMS TO EMBODY THE BURDON OF MANY MODERNIST PAINTERS BEFORE YOU. HOW DO YOU FEEL YOU FIT INTO THIS MOVEMENT? I think I have that melancholy feel. My work is very much influenced by a lot of Eurocentric work. My biggest influence would probably be Kandinsky. The reason why I started working in a very formalist way was because I was just sick of all the fucked up art in South Africa. I felt that it was atrocious. It’s shit. It was a whole group of us and most of us came out of Pretoria, we work in a very modernist narrative. The only art that really resonated with me was from guys like Walter Battiss. The art was just boring and we were in such a volatile space, my work is volatile and it is aggressive. There is a lot of anger in it. But it is not about the anger, I’m just mirroring. It’s where I’m at and society definitely plays a role, about what’s going on around me and what I see and experience. I would really like to make work that is more Zen. My previous work was very quiet, almost like a silent scream in a way. My life isn’t Zen. My life is chaotic. I am fucking chaotic and unstable, but there is like a little bit of poetry in it and a little bit of quiet. I balance it. It’s very considered. YOUR PROCESS OF DRAWING IN YOUR SKETCH BOOKS TO EXECUTING IT ONTO CANVAS – WHAT MAKES A PARTICULAR PATTERN OR DOODLE STAND OUT AND WHAT MAKES YOU DECIDE TO USE IT? Like I said earlier, I’m quite a neurotic creator and I am constantly busy making something. Whether it’s doing Glitching work on my phone or drawing in my book. I always have an A5 in my bag and some pens. I always have something on me. It’s always my safe space in a way, a way I can subtract and where I can return to myself. My previous exhibition was quite specific (Some Kind of Nature), that work was very specific. It featured drawings that I made while I was going to bed at night. I would lie down and

start drawing with the lights off, with my eyes closed. I would start making a sketch and then fall asleep, only to find out the result of the drawing the next morning. I called them my masturbation drawings. I did them when I was in rehab. I shared a room with people so it was quite difficult to masturbate. I started doing these drawings as a way to fall asleep at night. For me when I look at them there is a sense of artistic perversion, so within the drawings there is very much a feel of sexual frustration. But, it was also like a ‘surrealist act’ because there were times where I believe that I was already asleep and still drawing, purely in terms of a habit, which is very much a modernist ideology. These drawings then became large-scale paintings. Translating harsh scratch marks and having to recreate them in such a large scale is quite a feat. Drawing lines on an A5 piece of paper is very different to lying on a huge canvas because the entire movement is different. Having to translate that kind of direction, attitude, forcefulness, rhythm and flow. The paint is also thicker than pencil so it’s a completely different medium. I have hundreds of drawings which I revisit all the time. There are at least ten drawings that make up one painting. It would be a multiple amount of drawings that I would put together and then I would collage them in my head in a way. I would see which marks were good and place them on the canvas. It was a massive amount of planning going into them. It’s not just coincidental. Sometimes I do a painting and it just comes naturally from nowhere, I would just do it. Other times I would really plan it out and labour over it for months, making sure that everything was how I wanted it and how I envisioned it. I’m very anal when it comes to my paintings, even though they have that sense of rough anarchy. On the other hand I also like to hide that process in way, disguise it in a way, to fool people. All the layers contain a story of what you put into it. I love making a painting and then killing it, painting the whole canvas white again and then making another one, then killing it. Sometimes there are so many paintings on one canvas that you are not even aware of. It carries all this information that you don’t even know about. What’s lurking under the surface? There is a lot there you know. I find that very interesting, it’s a form of personal censorship. I’m censoring my own work in a way. DO YOU THINK THE AGE OLD RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE ARTIST AND VICE WILL EVER DISAPPEAR? IT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN A PRETTY SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP FROM THE START? I think that it is an absolute necessity. Do you know any great artist that did not use anything and was completely sober? Artists have a very peculiar soul and I think for an artist of any form there is a melancholy and over sensitivity, vices just help with the drama. There is an inexhaustible desire to create and with that there is also an inexhaustible desire to destroy. I have questioned this a lot of the time. It’s almost as if it is a little bit easier to open the floodgates when they’re a little bit lubricated. It’s terrifying staring at this big-ass fucking canvas, this white fucking demon, and you’re like shit I have to paint something. But when you have a bit of Dutch courage it’s a lot easier to slay the dragon. It’s easier to slay the fucking dragon when you have chased some of the dragon… It’s also a romantic notion of the depressed or

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the distorted soul of the struggling artist. But art will always have its vice. HOW DOES THE WORK COMMUNICATE WITH YOU, WHEN DO YOU KNOW IT’S FINISHED? I always over work my work and then I have to kill everything and start all over again. That’s the fun thing about it because you can’t erase. It’s immediate. I have come to a point where I can’t see anything to add to it. The work communicates with me in a way, we have a conversation. I have in-depth conversations with my work and it’s like when do you know you have finished writing a song? Is it at 3 minutes? 16 minutes? When do you know it’s finished? You just know. Sometimes like in my last exhibition it was the first time that I just stopped, almost as I started. Where it was only three or four layers to the ten layers that I would have done in the past. It was like my pre-sketch became the painting. It was the worst time of my fucking life and it was the hardest show to put together. I mean being in rehab and trying to put a show together. I was now doing all the work sober while previously for my entire life I was fucked on something. My work has always had some kind of a substance involved in it. So suddenly I’m doing all of this sober for the first time in my life and it was fucking difficult. I felt like I lost a connection with my work, like a lost me in a way, who am I now? Substance has been a part of my life for a long time and has always been a part of my process. Sometimes Jonathan (Blank Projects) would just come and take them and tell me they’re finished. As I worked I would send him pictures and he would help me a lot of times and tell me to stop because it was finished or tell me it still needed something. I rely a lot on his input and he is a real guide in my life. It’s finished when I can’t do anything else on it. THE NAMING OF YOUR WORK IS A VERY RELEVANT PART OF IT – HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT ASSIGNING A CERTAIN NAME TO A PARTICULAR ARTWORK? I always think of stuff that I think would be a rad name for a painting and then write the names in my sketchbook. But, I seldom actually go back to those things. It’s actually something that I would not like to share really. A lot of people ask me this. The naming of my work is like a game I play with myself and I’m going leave it at that. I mean it’s interesting, like I said before in the beginning how it started out with the naming of the work. Most abstract paintings are names like “Untitled 1”, “Untitled 2”, etc. That shit is boring as hell and I kind of started to play games with the viewer, where the name kind of throws you off or gives you a completely different meaning in your head. How you try to put together these two aspects and it transforms and changes the way you see it because suddenly there’s these two to three words, that shifts the work you know. It shifts and opens up another side and something else happens, which I like. My paintings are not always so coherent and there is always something for everyone in there. But coming back to the name, back in the day I used song lyrics and titles. I think it started off with “New Empire Blues” (by The International Noise Conspiracy), one of the first breakthrough paintings that I made. It was exhibited in a new painting exhibition in Durban, in 2005. 39

JAN HENRI BOOYENS : Data bending-“From the corruption of data to the confusion of formats” (2014) 40

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JAN HENRI BOOYENS - “Unknown Pleasures “(2014) Oil on canvas, 170 × 200 cm

JAN HENRI BOOYENS - “Die teorie van weerstand in die gaskamer” (2014) Oil on canvas, 170 × 200 cm

OBVIOUSLY SIZE IS QUITE A FACTOR WHEN IT COMES TO YOUR WORK – DO YOU FIND THAT THE SIZE OF THE WORK HELPS TO COMMUNICATE THE WORK BETTER TO THE VIEWER?

image and change it to raw data and manipulate it so that it is a .wav file. Using sound effects on the image to add reverb or treble and then exporting it again as data and making it into a JPEG again. You also have no idea what the outcome of it will be.

Most of the smaller paintings are mostly just a palette for the bigger paintings, so I use a small one to paint a big one and then the small painting just kind of happens. That’s kind of what happens almost all of the time. I like doodling and it helps to see how colours relate and how they work together. I mean don’t get me wrong they are works in themselves but they act as sketches and would happen while I am working on the bigger pieces. It’s sort of like a little brother or place to clean my brush, very spontaneous. More free in a way and not as considered. I’m very comfortable with the large works because I’m a big guy and the painting just sits nice with me. I have a great eye for it and I’m really comfortable with the space I have to work on. I just feel very comfortable working in that size and it’s the whole modernist thing about grandeur and you need to make big ass motherfucking oil paintings. IS ‘AVANT CAR GUARD’ DEAD? DO YOU THINK IT COULD OR SHOULD BE RESURRECTED, BECAUSE IT HAD A HUGE IMPACT ON ALL OF YOUR CAREERS AS ARTISTS? It’s dead. It’s a dead artist. Avant Car Guard (Michael McGarry, Zander Blom and Jan Henri Booyens) was an artist and has always been one artist, since the conception of it. We decided it was one artist and that artist unfortunately died of a massive aneurism, a massive cancer. He was one my favourite artists. Anything is possible but let’s give it at least twenty years. It was very necessary at the time and it played a big part in all of our lives. It really helped our careers tremendously and shit got fucking weird like with any great band. YOU’RE WORKING ON A LOT OF GLITCH ART OR DATA BENDING AT THE MOMENT. WHAT WAS IT ABOUT THE ELECTRONIC MEDIUM THAT APPEALED TO YOU AND WHERE DO YOU SEE IT FITTING INTO YOUR FUTURE WORK?

Well, before I was a painter I was actually a video artist and in my final exhibition when I did my degree in Durban I only had one painting. A really small painting of a veld fire and the rest was all sound and a video. I was mad into the new media at the time. I wanted to deny painting because I was very passionate about becoming just a pure media artist. But, unfortunately that kind of art does just not work in this country. Either the gallery assistants forget to switch the machines on or the projector gets stolen. I was a sort of installation artist. I did my first solo show at the KZN gallery called “Minor acts of violence”, which was basically a sound and video installation. So now that my paintings are solid and doing well I have time to explore my other passion again. I have been working on them for quite some time but have just never put them into the public realm. The first glitch I did was in 2008 and even when I was doing my videos I was overlaying video and taking away alpha channels and really destroying the image in a way. Glitches have opened up a whole new language for me in a way. I’m not sure where I see it going in the future but I am seeing it in the future. I have only scratched the surface of it. At my residency at the AVA I had some amazing glitch works and video mulching with the help of Jannes Hendriks, where we made an amazing interactive video. It’s just such a pity that his laptop got stolen and all the work was lost. I really don’t care if people think it’s as relevant as my paintings. It’s not important for me. What is important for me is that it inspires me and it creates a new excitement in me, it’s leading in a whole different way for me. A new language and its short lifespan, the art form has an entire new aesthetic. What I also love about it is that I am corrupting the image and the code of it, abstracting information. It has so much poetry to it. We live in a society where information gets corrupted all the time. I’m quite excited to see where it goes. You get Apps that can do it all for you but most my works are made in a data bending method. I open an image in a Hex editor like Notepad and I go to the code and I fuck around with the code. It is actually painstakingly difficult to corrupt it to a point where it is still readable by the device because it is so easy to fuck it up. A new process that’s been really inspiring is when I take the

WHAT IS IT ABOUT THE BLANK PROJECTS GALLERY AND THE OWNER JONATHAN THAT APPEALS TO YOU? To me it’s the only gallery, it’s like a family and Jonathan has been through some knocks with me. Jonathan to me is almost more important than my own blood. For me he is like an older brother, he is a mentor and someone that inspires me. He has fucking saved my life man and he has literally taken me out of the fucking pits of hell and brought me back to life. I fucking owe him so much and he has been so supportive and really believes in me. You don’t find that with other galleries, he believes in me and he is so personally involved with all of his artists and he believes in them, what they are doing and he understands what they do. Where a lot of other guys just don’t have a clue. In his belief he manages to sell your work. He is also the only guy that was actually an artist. He studied art in Berlin and I believe that he still has aspirations of being an artist. It’s kind of like owning a record label in a way. Blank Projects is punk as fuck, it’s raw and that’s who I am and who we are. We are going to change the face of South African art. He is also changeling,

he understands art and he knows what is going on in art. Whereas, a bunch of the other people just don’t have a fucking clue and are just in it for the money. WHERE DO YOU FEEL YOUR WORK FITS INTO SOUTH AFRICAN ART MOVEMENTS, COMPARED TO WHERE THEY WOULD FIT IN ABROAD? I think that my work is totally on par with what is happening abroad. It has been quoted that I did start a whole new movement, which is awesome. I have played my part and I have influenced a great number of artists in South Africa. I think I’m probably the dark horse of South African art, I think people find me maybe a bit difficult and they are a bit scared. I think I have a hectic reputation. I have been to prison a bit more than any normal person should in a very short period of time and I think people find that scary. I don’t find it scary. I find it enlightening. WHAT MOVEMENT OF ART DO YOU FEEL WE ARE EXPERCIENG AT THE MOMENT? I always thought of it as post-modern modernism. Contemporary art is already twenty years old, so it’s not that contemporary anymore. Art at the moment is very difficult because a lot of it happens on Tumblr. I call it Tumblrism!

songs for the deaf Sonic Youth Confusion Is Sex 1983 Neutral

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Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie... 1995 Virgin

Against Me! New Wave 2007

David Bowie Diamond Dogs 1974

SIRE

RCA

Fokofpolisiekar As Jy Met Vuur Speel Sal Jy Brand - 2003 Rhythm

fromage et le vin Stan Engelbrecht / TOUR OF ARAE QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - Stan Engelbrecht

“I just didn’t want people rocking up in their hideous 2009 Penny Pinchers Family Fun Ride lycra tops. Those things are unnecessarily ugly and just alienate people from the sport. I don’t get why people are happy to ride around like a rolling advertisement.” LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING, WHERE DID THE BASIC IDEA FOR THE TOUR COME FROM? For a long time now I’ve loved the aesthetic of those early grueling Italian and French bicycle races, the ones you always see captured in black and white, depicting filthy grease and mud covered men pitted against the elements and the clock, looking like they’re barely surviving. My good friend Nic Grobler and I were looking through an old photographic book about those early Grand Tours, and we were wondering out loud about why modern races had become so ugly and commercial, and so disconnected from the environments they move through. It suddenly dawned on us that we could just organise our own race, and arrange it in such a way that it celebrates the spirit of the old European classics.

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW YOU STATED, “CYCLING NOW IS HIDEOUS, IT’S VERY UGLY. THAT’S WHY I DON’T DO ANY OF THESE RACES, THE WHOLE ATMOSPHERE IS HORRIBLE. THIS RACE IS THE ANTITHESIS OF THAT.” WOULD YOU LIKE TO ELABORATE ON THIS? Over the last years I’ve been doing a lot of bicycle touring around South Africa, and often when strangers see me on my bike they’d mention that this or that bicycle race came through their town. When you ask them how it was, more often than not they’ll tell you they never interacted with anybody from the race, the community didn’t benefit from the race in any way and all they left behind were thousands of empty energy gel (or whatever

There are a few events that are similar in ways to the Tour of Arae, and I would say they were definitely an inspiration too. But, I think what makes the Tour of Arae unique is the rule that you have to race on an old South African built steel frame. Now a lot of people don’t know this, but we had a burgeoning steel frame building scene right here in South Africa, peaking in the 1980s. Hansom, Alpina, Zini, Le Jeune and Cosmos are just a few of the brands you might recognise. But many of these great frames are stripped of their heritage when they are repainted and modified into ‘fixie’ lookalikes, as is the trend at the moment. By making it a rule that each competitor has to ride a South African built steel bike, I hope to bring a bit of attention

ONLY 35 RIDERS ARE ALLOWED ENTRY INTO THE RACE AND THE ENTRIES FILLED UP VERY QUICKLY. WOULD YOU CONSIDER BUMPING UP THE AMOUNT OF RIDERS IN THE FUTURE DUE TO THE MASSIVE RESPONSE YOU RECEIVED FROM THE FIRST ONE? I don’t really want to. From the beginning I wanted the race to be small and intimate. I wanted everyone to get to know each other and be able to hang out and drink wine, talk about bikes and connect. When a group is too big, creating that kind of experience is more difficult. And besides, some of the little towns we went through literally couldn’t accommodate or feed more that 35 people at a push! That’s how I arrived at 35. For next year I might try and take it up to 40, but no more. 42

THERE IS NO PRIZE MONEY OR SPONSORS AND SOME VERY SIMPLE RULES BUT ENTERTAINING ONES, LIKE NO CAMELBAKS, NEON LYCRA OR UGLY GLASSES. WERE THESE JUST PERSONAL PET PEEVES OR WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO KEEP CERTAIN FACTORS OUT OF THE EQUATION? Look, you could wear neon lycra and Oakleys if they’re period specific and you could pull it off, in harmony with your bicycle. Some of those rules were aesthetic guides. I just didn’t want people rocking up in their hideous 2009 Penny Pinchers Family Fun Ride lycra tops. Those things are unnecessarily ugly and just alienate people from the sport. I don’t get why people are happy to ride around like a rolling advertisement. For next year I’m making the rules stricter though, only 100% wool garments like they used to wear in the old days.

WERE YOU FAMILIAR WITH THE TERRAIN BEFORE YOU MAPPED OUT THE FINAL ROUTE OF THE TOUR? From the outset I wanted this race to be ridden on vintage road bikes, and I wanted the race to follow a predominately gravel road route. I had a few ideas from previous bicycle touring trips through the Karoo, and that was definitely my starting point. The Karoo is an incredible place to ride - the vast open landscapes, big skies, the silence, the harshness of the environment and weather made it an easy choice. From there I had to look at a few logistical aspects like which towns did I want the race to go through and were they close enough to each other to make it viable. In bicycle races it’s not unheard of to have 200 or 300 kilometer days, I thought it wise to make our days about 120 kilometers and have the race run for roughly about a week. Remember, I had not done these roads on an old road bike yet and I had no idea of the level of difficulty. The idea was to start in Franschhoek because of its French heritage, and the wine of course. I really wanted the race to end in historic Matjiesfontein with a big dinner at the old Lord Milner Hotel. So, I mapped out something rough, packed a small backpack and jumped on my old 1980s Alpina and just rode. It was tough going at times - muddy, sandy, windy, hot and cold. It all fell into place in the end, and the route was born.

between Touwsrivier and Laingsburg. Near the end of the day after a short but very steep climb, racers were met by Poppie and her two daughters, doing the traditional rieldans and running after passing racers to hand them a freshly baked roosterkoek straight from the fire. I hope to include more of this kind of thing in future.

YOU HAVE TO CARRY YOUR OWN TOOLS, REPAIR KITS AND WATER WHILE RELYING ON ENDURANCE AND HUMAN BEHAVIOUR. THE RACE SEEMS LIKE A TRUE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE BICYCLE, THE RIDER AND THE OPPONENTS, ALL WITH NO SUPPORT VEHICLE?

that shit is) packets. Aside from that it’s all about the latest, most expensive bikes, big sponsorship (and all their shitty logos plastered over every available surface) and ‘goodie bags’ full of crap no one wants or needs. The Tour of Arae is about drinking wine and eating good bread and cheese, enjoying meals made by local people, sourced locally as far as possible, sleeping in little small-town B&Bs and hotels, and leaving no unnecessary waste behind. And of course looking good while we’re doing it, the rules forbid the racers to wear lycra covered in logos and so forth. Also, participants had to ride a vintage road bike with no modern components. EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS EVENT HAS SET YOU GUYS APART FROM EVERY OTHER BICYCLE RACE IN THE COUNTRY, IF NOT THE WORLD – ARE YOU AWARE OF ANY SIMILAR EVENTS LIKE THIS?

to that mostly forgotten frame building scene and get some of these fine bikes into the collections of like-minded bicycle enthusiasts like myself. HOW INVOLVED IS THE FARMING COMMUNITY AND RESIDENTS ALONG THE ROUTE? As much as I could involve them on this first Tour of Arae race. I organised this entire 6-day event on my own, so logistically it was a challenge. Most folks in these areas don’t have email and sometimes only a land-line! So there were lots of phone calls, text messages, WhatsApps and physically going around to folks to arrange everything from hotel bed designation to having pancakes in a little roadside café. But everything went incredibly smoothly, I’m glad to say. One of the biggest highlights of the tour was Tannie Poppie’s roosterkoek and pineapple beer stop that I arranged for the third stage of the tour,

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You got it. I believe your entire attitude to those around you, your equipment and your environment changes when there is no one to pick up the pieces when things go wrong. I loved it when people were helping each other fix bikes, encouraging each other, sharing their food and water. It really adds a unique element to the race and of course you really learn to know your bike. Because these are old bikes, things can break and wear out, you have to come up with creative solutions to be able to keep going. What a sense of achievement you feel if your machine breaks down in some catastrophic way and you actually manage to repair it out on some dusty road and finish the day. I know that I feel a special love for my Alpina because of it. WITH THIS BEING THE FIRST EVENT, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY WERE THE MOST CHALLENGING UNFORESEEN PROBLEMS THAT REVEALED THEMSELVES TO YOU THROUGH THE STAGES? Everything went pretty much perfectly. There were some hiccups here and there, but nothing serious. From the start there was a very informal feel to the race and I always wanted that. So, no problems really. IT SEEMS THAT WINNING IS ALMOST LAST ON THE AGENDA OF THE RACE, HOW COMPETITIVE WAS THE FIRST EVENT OR DO RIDERS SEE IT MORE AS A

“I’m happy for the Tour of Arae to stay a predominantly South African event. I don’t want any of our beautiful South African built steel frames to end up in foreign collections. Ha ha. But seriously, of course I would love to have a few International riders competing.”

PERSONAL CONTEST OF STAMINA AND ENDURANCE? Both. There was definitely a group that were racing to win. It was quite fascinating to watch all the strategy and alliances being formed. Real bicycle racing you know. But, I would say the majority of the field took it on as a personal challenge, with some even surprising themselves by competing with some of the faster riders. It must be said that this race was hard, very hard. Racing skinny-tyred old road bikes at an average of 110 kilometers per day, over 6 days on rocky, sandy dirt roads is not easy. Throw in sweltering heat, insane headwinds, sleet, rain and even snow, and you have yourself a serious physical and psychological challenge. So, for all Tour of Arae racers this is an achievement akin to surviving some of the toughest trails they might ever face in their lives. The fifth stage of the tour was a particularly tough day, the 110 kilometer day between Merweville and Sutherland. The stage included one of the toughest and steepest climbs, but to make things worse there was an extremely strong constant headwind the entire day. Everyone had it tough, but the slower riders towards the end of the day had to fight the wind and icy rain for the last 40 kilometers into Sutherland, in the dark. They refused to give up and after being in the saddle and out in the elements for nearly 12 hours, they rolled into town like heroes. They were wet, freezing and fighting hypothermia, but they did it. What an achievement. DID YOU RECEIVE ANY FOREIGN INTEREST FROM RIDERS WANTING TO COME AND TAKE PART IN THE EVENT?

Yes, quite a bit actually. But I’m happy for the Tour of Arae to stay a predominantly South African event. I don’t want any of our beautiful South African built steel frames to end up in foreign collections. Ha ha. But seriously, of course I would love to have a few International riders competing. Although it might be difficult, I’ve decided that each competitor who raced in the inaugural Tour of Arae gets to keep their race number for life and they’re automatically entered in every year’s event, with the option of forgoing their yearly place. Only those spots will be available in future and there is already a long waiting list. WHERE DID YOUR LOVE FOR CYCLING COME FROM AND WHAT HAS MADE IT SUCH AN INTEGRAL PART OF YOUR LIFE ? I had a red Western Flyer Scorpion BMX when I was little and I loved that bike. I rode it everywhere. By the time I became a teenager mountain biking was becoming a bit of a thing and I soon started obsessing about certain frames, paint schemes, components and so on. I had outgrown the BMX by this stage and I had a crappy Peugeot that I rode to school and back. So, I saved up and I bought my first proper mountain bike from this German bike shop in Windhoek, where I was living at the time, called Velowerkstatt. The owner was the first guy to import decent mountain bikes and even though I was lusting after a pink Mongoose IBOC, I couldn’t afford it. So I bought a teal Giant Sedona. Shit, I loved that thing. And I rode it all over the little single track paths around the city. About a year later my family moved to George, at the time the heart of mountain biking in South

Africa. I spent the last two years of schooling riding around the forests in the area and avoiding school, home and any sort of responsibility. It was my escape and it was in that time that I deeply fell in love with the freedom that came along with being on a bike. I could go where I wanted to, under my own steam and I could do it alone. By the time I moved to Cape Town to study art I found a new escape, photography and partying. I always kept the great old steel Kona Explosif I had, but sadly I didn’t ride much in those first years living here. By the time I rediscovered cycling it was all about aluminum frames and suspension, and I joined in. But it was my irritation with driving in city traffic that led me to commuting by bicycle and thanks to the internet and traveling overseas a few times, I learnt that there was more to cycling than competitive mountain and road cycling. I became a commuter. My interest in the history of cycling grew as I was researching older steel frames to convert into as-simple-as-possible commuter bikes. That was it. And the obsession grows. I even got rid of my car about 5 years ago. I only cycle now. YOU ARE ALSO KNOWN AS A PROMINENT PHOTOGRAPHER WITH QUITE A FEW BOOKS AND EXHIBITIONS UNDER YOUR BELT. ONE OF THE LAST BEING A POPULAR 3 VOLUME BOOK SIMPLY NAMED ‘BICYCLE PORTRAITS’ WHERE YOU DOCUMENTED COMMUTERS FROM ALL WALKS OF LIFE ACROSS THE COUNTRY. ARE THERE ANY OF THESE PUBLICATIONS STILL AVAILABLE AND ARE YOU WORKING ON ANY NEW PROJECTS AT THE MOMENT? Yes, ‘Bicycle Portraits’ and all my previous publica-

tions are still available. The exception is my first book ‘The Caution Horses’, a black and white study of a herd of wild horses that live in the Namibian desert. That sold out many years ago. Right now I’m not working on a new specific project. I don’t think I’ll be publishing any more physical paper-and-ink books in future. It’s time for something new. Or maybe I’ll just keep riding my bike around. WHICH 5 ALBUMS WOULD YOU SAY CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF THE RACE? There was one Tour of Arae racer who attained legendary status by the end of day one, artist Justin Fiske chose to ride the roughly 700 kilometer race on a fixed gear bicycle. If anybody truly captured the spirit of the Tour of Arae, it was him. He rode an old Le Jeune road frame, converted to fixed gear, with a wheel that could be flipped for a lighter gear on the opposite side for steep hills. In place of water bottles he had a water bag tied into the front triangle of his frame and instead of padded tape on his handlebars he simply wrapped them in what looked like bandages. Justin rode in a simple woolen jersey with a beat-up old rain jacket to protect him from the cold and rain. Over his shoulder he carried a messenger bag from which he ate gherkins and cheese, and drank rum whenever someone found him ensconced under a bush or tree somewhere along the route. He always had music in his ears. The news came in every day, Justin was seen here or there, sharing his rum or camembert with some fellow racer and listening to Brahms or Bach or Beethoven. So, instead I give you the 5 albums that got Justin to the finish line in Matjiesfontein...

justin fiske lament Steve Reich Music For Mallet Instruments

1974 Deutsch Grammophon

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Glenn Gould plays Brahms 1983 CBS

Evgeny Kissin Historic Russian Archives 2004 Brilliant Classics

RATM rage against the machine 1992 Epic

NAME The Hanging Gardens of Beatenberg 2014 - Universal

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EAT YOUR SHOES SIMON ‘WOODY’ WOOD QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - Virginia Cummins

adidas Originals embarked on a mission to bring SIMON ‘Woody’ WOOD from sneaker freaker magazine to South Africa to gain exclusive insight into the local melting pot that is receiving an increasing amount of interest internationally. While here, he visited the country's biggest creative hubs, which together stand at the epicentre of a uniquely African movement. WHERE DOES THE TERM ‘SNEAKER’ STEM FROM AND IN YOUR OPINION, WHICH SHOES WOULD YOU CONSIDER THE FIRST AUTHENTIC SNEAKERS? I have tried to read about it but I don’t think there is a particularly interesting story. I think it’s just the idea of having a rubber sole shoe that you can literally sort of sneak up on someone. I’m not sure, it’s sort of one of those inexplicable terms I suppose. I mean when I was a kid they were often called “sand shoes” which is a phrase that you don’t hear anymore, which I think comes from playing Tennis on a sand or clay court. They have obviously had different names and it has come a long way from the 1950s. I think the Chuck Taylor to me is kind of like sneaker no.1 really and everything else is a derivative. There were sneakers before that, they looked pretty similar and had a big circular logo on the side. The design was just super generic. It wasn’t really about the brand but about a cheap shoe that you used to play basketball in or to go to the gym in. BEFORE YOU STARTED THE MAGAZINE IN 2002, HOW AWARE WERE YOU OF OTHER COLLECTORS AROUND THE WORLD? Absolutely, it’s funny - I mean it’s not that long ago but it predated every form of social media. Even email was sort of relatively new. There were a few sneaker forums, there was one in the UK called “Crooked Tongues” and they had some really die-hard members there but it was very early days, it was a real nerd thing, there was nothing cool about it. You didn’t kind of meet people on the street and go, “Oh I got a hold of this shoe or that shoe”. The way you got shoes was by travelling and going to London, NYC or Tokyo and bringing them back. If you did see someone with something then you would be right in thinking, “this guy has got something going on”. Previous rarities are now so accessible and so prevalent in just about every single country in the free world. It’s lost that sort of mystery element I suppose. When we started the magazine it definitely connected a lot of people and they were saying that they were thinking the same thing. A lot of guys from my generation were kind of thinking the same thing at the same time and yet we didn’t know each other, we all contributed our own little part in whatever you want to call it, the “scene” or whatever it is. It sort of changed the industry I think. It’s been an incredible 12 years of never ending crazy stuff and to think that I would come to South Africa at all and be sitting here with you is as equally mysterious. How did this all happen – all I wanted was free shoes… IS THERE SOME SORT OF A GLOBAL STOCK MARKET IN SNEAKER TRADING, WHAT CHARACTERISTICS PLACE THE VALUE ON A SPRECIFIC SHOE? That’s a really good question – it’s very similar to the stock market. Things go up and down. There is a mechanism and you have places of distribution. Where was the shoe available? How many pairs were made? You have a sort of formula and try to work it out at some point. I don’t really know a lot about advanced mathematics but you can probably work out a ratio of all these things, desirability is no.1, accessibility too and possibly a random one where there would be someone like Kanye West involved. So there you 46

have a personality part of it as well and that all adds up to the street price. Now the street price is very different to the retail price. There are kids out there who sleep out for two or three days in front of the store. They buy those shoes and flip them, make $1000 on each. That’s really a modern thing, I mean kids now are buying and selling shoes all over the world and sending them to each other. That’s really the secondary part of the industry and it’s global. I think there was about a $100 000 000 worth of Jordans sold on Ebay last year so that gives you an idea of the scale of it. It’s a bit of a phenomenon. We call it the “sneaker game” because to me it is a bit of a game. All these variables and these things are happening in real time. When we started the magazine it was such a niche thing, I mean how many people could really be interested in that? It turns out that it’s a huge thing because it draws in the basketball kids and the skateboard kids. People are just drawn to it because there is a lot of energy in it. Kids are really into shoes from a purist design point and within this niche individuals have their own personal sort of interest. It’s an ever-mutating kind of thing I suppose.

We are all humans and all driven by different things, but ultimately when you tell someone that they can’t have something then that could be the most motivating thing in the world. So yes, to answer your question it can be cynical but at the same time the average consumer needs to understand that they can’t have every shoe that ever comes out. It does not work like that and if there are less rather than more then the desirability factor is way up there. YOU HAVE DONE A NUMBER OF COLLABORATIONS WITH A FEW DIFFERENT SHOE MANUFACTURERS, ARE GUYS JUST BASICALLY LINED UP OUTSIDE YOUR DOOR? WHAT MAKES YOU DECIDE TO DO A COLAB WITH SOMEONE AND HAVE YOU TURNED ANY PUNTERS AWAY IN THE PAST? We have turned people down. It’s really difficult, we don’t want to be seen as doing too many but there are interesting projects and some of them just have really interesting stories attached to them. Crazy things happen during the process. For example, when we did our Pumas last year I stupidly decided to make fifty pairs, I mean I could of said a thousand but I just said fifty and our website just melted! It was a fantastic feeling but at the same time we also let down a lot of people who were trying to get our shoes. But, then again it’s all part of the game, so there were only fifty happy people that day. We have done that before, where we used shark leather. It does resemble elephant leather, it’s really tough and wrinkly, not shiny and smooth but I think the brands have moved away from those exotic textures.

DO YOU FEEL THAT CERTAIN COMPANIES FORCE A CERTAIN SHOE TO BECOME COLLECTABLE BY DELIBERATELY MAKING LIMITED RUNS OF A CERTAIN COLOUR WAY, WHERE AS IN THE PAST SHOES WOULD BECOME COLLECTABLE BECAUSE OF NOSTALGIA OR BECAUSE IT REPRESENTED AN ERA OR FASHION STATEMENT AT THE TIME? Look, I think that even in the nineties brands were into it but now things are much more sophisticated in general, in terms of analyzing and strategizing about all these things. Somewhere in the nineties, brands were very much aware of not making too many shoes because then they would end up on the sale rack. They were very conscious about that and went through a period where they did make too many shoes. Now you have the situation where they are making a lot of shoes and it’s still not enough, so they are under cooking the market or are they keeping it sustainable for a longer period and there is actually an enormous amount of really clever people thinking about that kind of stuff. In 2002, limited edition was a huge selling point but it’s a pretty meaningless term because everything is limited by nature. It’s not like there is a rulebook that says something is limited edition, 40 to 50 or 2000 to 5000? A lot of the cool stuff is made in very small numbers, it’s very infuriating and it drives people nuts, it works on me as well. If you tell me I can’t have it then I worry about who to call, who to email and how I’m going to get that shoe? Occasionally, it doesn’t happen. Recently, I struck out for the first time in a while on a pair of Jordan Futures and it has been driving me crazy.

YOU’RE ALSO A FAN OF CERTAIN VINTAGE SPORTS CARS, ESPECIALLY THE 1973 XB GT351 FORD FALCON COUPE OR THE MAD MAX INTERCEPTOR – HAVE YOU CONSIDERED DOING A SLEEK BLACK INTERCEPTOR SNEAKER FREAKER MODEL WITH ANYBODY? Yeah (laughs) I know – I think that is still a great example of a film that is truly Australian, the great sense of Armageddon with the road, the desert and Mel at his peak. The way that the film was made, the aesthetic of it and how it’s been used in Hip Hop videos and stuff. That car is similar to shoes and it was embedded in my brain as a teenager, I could never think of a car that was more badass or more brutal. It’s a unique Australian model. I have a similar looking car, it is big and black, has a huge engine in it and it’s incredibly intimidating. DO YOU SEE A MUCH BIGGER MARKET IN THE FUTURE FOR CUSTOMISED SNEAKERS, IN THE VEIN OF DAPPER

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DAN FROM THE 80S AND WHAT NASH MONEY DESIGNS HAVE BEEN DOING? Yeah I think the custom scene is changing a little bit, it used to be all about painting them. I think it started from people truly making something that no one else had and also when you don’t have money it’s really easy to just paint stripes on a Superstar or whatever it is. You need to have the right kind of paint and you need to treat the leather a certain way. It takes a certain personality to do something like that. You need to be a real nerd to go about it. It’s evolved into guys taking shoes apart and remaking them, some of them are truly beautiful and some of them loose their way or the shape goes out. The shape is super important. There is a guy called JBF Customs who I would say is probably one of the best. Nash Money is not really doing much at the moment but he was the original guy doing it, his thing was the moccasin stitch. He did that to every shoe, some really amazing stuff and he was very influential. WHEN DID THE COLLECTING BUG FOR SNEAKERS HIT YOU? WAS IT AN OBSESSION ABOUT HAVING SHOES THAT NO ONE ELSE HAS OR WAS THERE A CERTAIN MODEL THAT MADE THE TURNING POINT FOR YOU? My story is not that different from anybody my age. When I was in primary school I was looking at my shoes and kind of thinking that they were really cool and if I wore them right it would be a reflection of how cool I wanted to project myself. I think it’s the same things with cars, I mean I don’t want to drive a Porsche. I don’t want to be that guy. I had really limited access, kids now have access to phenomenal amounts of money and I came from a different time. My parents were primary school teachers, we weren’t poor but there wasn’t enough money to throw at a pair of Jordans or those sorts of things. As you get older and you make your own, you go back and get the things that you were never allowed to have. I suppose you then realise that you have spent all your money on shoes for the last 10 years. I just didn’t have the accessibility. I would wear a pair out until it was replaced. The idea of having ten or twenty pairs did not even exist. I would go down to the sport stores, just look at the wall and bug out. IS THERE SUCH A THING AS ‘THE HOLY GRAIL’ OF SNEAKERS, WHICH IS THE ONE PAIR THAT EVERY COLLECTOR WANTS, THE ONE PAIR TO RULE THEM ALL? We recently just ran a story on the black and gold Jordan 1. This guy bought them in a thrift store or charity shop and I think he paid a couple of bucks for them. There is a whole mythology around this shoe and at the time they were making shoes in Italy, using a type of leather that would get broken down over a certain amount of time. Potentially, they are worth $30 000 to $50 000. They are probably a bit too battered to be ‘Grade A’ condition but we still don’t know for sure. It’s got some sure giveaway signs like an 85 printed on the collar, which makes it look like it is from that era but we are not really sure, it’s a little bit tricky and we tried to go as high up the ladder as possible. Beyond that I don’t think there would be some sort of definitive shoe that would be super valuable but there are interesting stories like this and I think the brands have

become much more conscious of collecting that stuff and keeping it. For years they never had an archive department where they would actively store them. They just thought it would be a pain and would not be making them again in about 20 years time, which they now realise was a big mistake. I’M SURE YOU HAVE MANY, BUT DO YOU HAVE A CERTAIN PAIR IN YOUR COLLECTION THAT YOU WOULD CONSIDER TO BE YOUR FAVOURITE? It’s a little bit like asking which of your children is your favourite? I have a lot shoes that sort of bring back memories of how I got them or where I was at the time. For example, there is a great Adidas shoe that I had never seen and I bought them when I was in London. It’s called the ‘Winter Ball’, they have this huge rubber toe and these straps on the sides, they are really chunky and black. It’s a really interesting shoe and I’m not really sure what it was designed to do because it doesn’t look like it’s for some type of sport. To me that was really interesting at the time. I also used this transparent glue to fix them but when it dried the glue went like this weird shade of green and now they have this sort of horrific green glue mark on them. There was also this shoe brand in London at the time called ‘Acupuncture’ that seemed to have copied this shoe. It seemed like a beefy shell toe and that’s nobody’s favorite shoe but to me it was and occasionally you will still see a photo of it somewhere. They had a thing where they would put a teddy bear on the side of the sole and it looked really cute, but it had a big penis and it had been indented into the side of the sole. They had a really weird sense of humour, it was very fashionable and it certainly wasn’t for sport. I have a pair of Jordan 1s that a friend bought me at a flea market for $1, but they all have a sort of a weird story behind them, the best ones anyway.

FOR A LONG TIME, LOCAL SHOE COLLECTORS THOUGHT THAT THE CANADIAN NORTH STAR BRAND WAS ACTUALLY AN AUTHENTIC SOUTH AFRICAN BRAND. ARE YOU AWARE OF ANY OTHER CULTURES WHO HAVE CLAIMED A CERTAIN BRAND FOR THEMSELVES? In Australia, we have a shoe called the Volley. It’s a super humble tennis shoe made of canvas and rubber but it does not look like a Vans shoe. Vans shoes are a copy of a boat shoe. The Volley has this amazing grippy sole so it gets used a lot by people who are into yachting, but it’s also used by people who do roof tiling so it’s pretty nimble. It was originally a Dunlop shoe, which is an English tyre manufacturer and it’s still going. At one point they were selling 1.5 million pairs in Australia and they are now exporting into America and into Europe. I think it’s a bit like an UGG Boot, I think Australians claim credit for designing the UGG Boot. It’s a pretty dubious honour but you see really fashionable women wearing them and they are really into them, even in NYC. But, it’s like the Australian term “Bogan” which is like Redneck, well it’s a really Bogan thing to do. So I think the Volley is the only truly authentic Australian brand, even though it’s a bit more English than Australian. WHICH COUNTRY IS THE MOST OBSESSED ABOUT SNEAKER COLLECTING? I think probably the east coast of the USA in general, like if you look at where our website traffic comes from. It’s so ingrained in their daily lives, to the point where it’s much more based on walking, opposed to California where you have to have a car to get around. There are guys like Bobbito Garcia, he was really interested in shoes in the seventies, he wrote a book and he is quite an amazing person in general. So that sort of obsession has been going on since back then. No one had any way of sharing it besides

him and the guys who lived in his block or who he played ball with. Even then, there was a kind of culture for ranking things. He was into painting swooshes and stripes on shoes, so it’s not like we are the first generation of people to obsess about shoes. But, we are the first to make it a mainstream occupation.

SNEAKER FREAKER X ADIDAS TORSION INTEGRAL / 2013

ARE THERE ANY OTHER SPECIAL PROJECTS COMING UP WHICH WE CAN EXPECT FROM SNEAKER FREAKER? We’ve got to have another magazine out by Christmas. We got a little bit sidetracked this year with a few projects plus we have about four shoes coming out next year. We are also working on a history book for Globe, the Australian skateboarding company. It’s a really great Australian story and we are really pleased to work on that. We are also working on a children’s book and two Sneaker Freaker books, one is our ten year anniversary book. It’s been amazing to be so ingrained into the industry. Things are always going and it’s guaranteed that we will always be working on something.

woody’s top tunes Booka Shade Memento 2004 Get Physical music

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Mark Lanegan The Winding Sheet 1990 SUB POP

SHUKO Sleepless 2013 Jakarta

the klf Chill Out 1990 KLF Com

EOMAC SPECTRE 2014 Killekill

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QUICK FIX IVAN BALLACK / BALLACK ART HOUSE QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - IVAN BALLACK

“What I like to do is go out and explore, in search of little streets that I’ve never been down before. It’s like finding a new skate spot to play in. In fact, I find that getting on my bike or skateboard is the best way to explore because you tend to notice things that you would miss in a car, or even go on foot.”

HOW LONG HAVE YOU BEEN ON INSTAGRAM NOW AND WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO JOIN THE ONLINE MEDIUM? I’ve been on Instagram for a little more than two years now. I decided to join it because it was a rad way for me to generate some cash instead of waiting for a sale on a painting to happen. To make an image, print it and sell it in some kind of format. It was also an instant way to show work – an instant portfolio. Artists literally don’t even need a website anymore. I also thought it was rad that I could easily follow people whose work I really like. And it’s a great way of getting exposure to new people and work. It’s like a large and easily accessible bank of inspiration. The coolest part of it is that I can get a good gauge of what images are more popular and that in turn helps me make selections for our Ballack Art House product ranges. MOST PEOPLE ONLY POST PHOTOGRAPHS BUT YOU SEEM TO MANIPULATE A FEW OF THE PICTURES AND TEXTURES THAT YOU DOCUMENT. WHICH APPLICATIONS DO YOU USE TO CREATE THE EFFECTS? I’ll always go to Photoshop first. But in terms of getting a shot, I like to play with layout and work with the shapes and elements that make up the composition, instead of just focusing on the subject matter. I like to create mood shots or artworks, pieces that will create a certain ambience if placed in a home or office. Lately, I enjoy capturing textures and I tend to find them in urban environments. DO YOU SPECIFICALLY DECIDE ON CERTAIN TYPES OF IMAGES THAT YOU ARE LOOKING FOR BEFOREHAND OR DO YOU JUST RANDOMLY FIND THEM AS YOUR DAY GOES BY? It’s a combination of both. Sometimes I make a specific mission to go get something I want otherwise I’ll just spot something that I think is pretty and then shoot it. Like this latest shot on my feed (called ‘Some Of Us Have Had Enough’) of the burnt out car. While driving back from my dad’s place I spotted this car and decided to make a mission and get this shot. What I like to do is go out and explore, in search of little streets that I’ve never been down before. It’s like finding a new skate spot to play in. In fact, I find that getting on my bike or skateboard is the best way to explore because you tend to notice things that you would miss in a car, or even go on foot. YOU OBVIOUSLY HAVE A HUGE LOVE FOR VINTAGE CARS AS THEY FEATURE IN A LOT OF YOUR WORK, WHERE DOES THE LOVE FOR THESE OLD RETRO VEHICLES COME FROM? Ever since I was a small boy in primary school, driving to school with my mom, we would always discuss cars. “What car is that? What shape is that? That one with the four rings. Yeah, I like that one.”

And so my love grew for cars and old cars. The signage and use of colour in old cars has always been a draw card. I love seeing the use of space in these old machines because back then space was still abounding and not so limited as it is today. Vintage cars also tend to have a lot more style elements, offering a lot of angles to shoot from. Stumbling upon an old car is like finding an Easter egg. It’s always a fun surprise because it offers a hundred photo opportunities. And it’s the closest I can get to time travelling. DID YOU HAVE A KEEN INTEREST IN PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE YOU JOINED THE ONLINE PLATFORM? No, not as strong as I do now. Though there were always cameras around me, my mom used to have this old Ricoh film camera and I always fantasised about using it, but film was expensive. My first love was always art though. Instagram just became an extension of my art. So I’m reluctant to call myself a photographer, I’m actually just an artist using another tool. ARE MOST OF YOUR UPLOADS TAKEN WITH YOUR PHONE OR DO YOU ALSO ALLOW YOURSELF TO USE OTHER CAMERAS? I started out shooting only on my phone, an iPhone 4. Nowadays, I mostly use a camera. At the moment I’m using a Canon because it allows me to print in really large format without comprising on the picture quality. Hopefully one day I can go back to shooting with film, in which case I’d love to get my hands on a Leica. THE PICTURES CLEARLY SHOW THAT YOU HAVE A KEEN EYE FOR DETAIL WHEN YOU FOCUS ON THE MORE INDEPTH ANGLES OF CERTAIN OBJECTS. WHAT MADE YOU REALISE THAT THESE IMAGES COULD BE USED SO EFFECTIVELY THROUGH OTHER MEDIUMS? I like a photo to be engaging. It must attract your attention and give you that sense of familiarity, but at the same time it should make you go, “Gee, I’ve never seen it in that way before.” That’s what focusing on the details or trying different angles al-

lows me to do. Deciding on an angle or detail to focus on in a photo is a lot like planning the composition of a painting. Before you start you think about flow, layout, colour and ambience. I realised this after shooting the first three or four pics on Instagram and I’ve been using this approach ever since. INSTAGRAM SEEMS TO BE AN EXTENSION OF YOUR BUSINESS ‘BALLACK ART HOUSE’. PLEASE ELABORATE ON THE COMPANY AND ITS SERVICES? Ballack Art House actually started after I’d been on Instagram for a while. The husband of my business partner, Gretha Meyer, really liked my work and came up with the idea of creating an exhibition with them. The interest at the exhibition was great and Bob’s your uncle, Ballack Art House was born! The brand focuses on images and designs that I create and translates them into different products. Even before the brand came about I had always wanted to make pretty things for the home. So the creation of interior goods has been Ballack Art House’s main focus. These goods range from things like scatter cushions and lamps to magnets and canvases in various sizes. We’re in the process of developing new products like gift cards, clothing accessories and wallpaper. What I love about this brand and Instagram as its core tool is that it allows me to take current trends and express them in non-obvious ways, letting elements of the trends (for example triangles and chevrons that are all the rage now) occur naturally in my photos. So, in a way Instagram led me to Ballack Art House and it’s still very useful in terms of marketing. It allows people to see what I’m working on and it gives me instant feedback on their responses. WHAT PROCESS DO YOU USE TO TRANSFER THE IMAGES ONTO FABRIC AND WERE THERE ANY DIFFICULTIES INVOLVED IN THE INITIAL PROCESS? We use the digital print process to get images trans-

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ferred onto fabric and issues like colour consistency and shrinkage or keeping the fabric from pulling skew are some of the difficulties we continually deal with. WHERE CAN WE FIND ANY OF THE BALLACK CREATIONS AND HOW ARE THEY AVAILABLE TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC AT THE MOMENT? Ballack Art House creations are quite readily available. There are a few online stores like Superbalist. com (based in Cape Town), Deny Designs (based in the US) and Juniqe.com (based in Germany) that stock our goods and there are also local stores like Stable in Cape Town and the Modernist in Parkhurst, Johannesburg. For more info on where you can find our products, please contact Gretha at gretha@ballackarthouse.com. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT SELECTING WHICH PICTURES YOU CHOOSE TO USE FOR PRINT, WHAT DO YOU THINK MAKES AN IMAGE STAND OUT AND ULTIMATELY SELLABLE? It’s all about identifying images with a bit of commercial value. As artists we tend to like arbitrary or abstract things, but in order to turn art into something sellable we need to find imagery that people can relate to. If something resonates with someone on some level, chances are they’ll want to buy it. WHICH OF YOUR IMAGES TEND TO ATTRACT THE MOST ATTENTION ON YOUR FEED? The images that tend to attract more attention from followers are those on which I’ve done some design. NOW THAT INSTAGRAM HAS A VIDEO FEATURE, HAVE YOU DABBLED IN ANY VIDEO OR CONSIDERED GETTING INVOLVED ON VINE? I haven’t touched video yet. That’ll be for the new year. HOW MANY PHOTOS DO YOU RECKON YOU TAKE DURING AN AVERAGE WEEK AND HOW MANY OF THEM END UP BEING USED? I take about 20 to 30 images a week, but I end up using only three. It’s funny though because I always struggle to delete stuff. You never know what wacky concept it might be useful for in future. VISIT - www.ballackarthouse.com PLEASE GIVE US 5 OF YOUR FAVOURITE FEEDS THAT YOU FOLLOW? @theworldsyoungestman @roywrench @tempster_returns @monsterchildren @animal_face 49

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HEAVY ELEVATOR JAZZ Keenan Oakes / Dylan Viljoen: WILDERNESSKING QUESTIONS - RICK DE LA RAY

PHOTOGRAPHY - OLIVER KRUGER

“People have this perception that if you play metal then you’re angry and hate the world. That’s the general consensus, but what they seem to forget is that metal is a genre, just like pop and hip-hop. Each style has its musical traits and some are more aggressive or passive than others.” YOU GUYS STARTED OUT IN 2010 AS HEATHENS AND THEN CHANGED TO WILDERNESSKING IN 2011. WHAT MADE YOU CHANGE THE BAND NAME AND WHAT ARE THE MAIN DIFFERENCES IN MUSICAL STYLE BETWEEN THE TWO?

We’re a metal band influenced by a host of other musical styles, ranging from rock to black metal to folk. Under the banner of metal, we have room to explore all the different paths that may lead one to and from it.

Heathens started as a fun side-project with no other motives than to record an EP and play a couple of shows. We managed to put out a few small releases that garnered some attention, thanks to Angry Metal Guy and eventually Lurker’s Path. When Jesse joined the band in September of 2010 we began working on the Morning single, ushering in a more focused direction for the band. With a sense of urgency (and validation) in place, we set out to find a name that encompassed our new musical path, one that didn’t feel as limiting as Heathens. We wanted to give our musical ambitions the scope it deserved and not ostracize potential listeners. Wildernessking is simply an evolution from Heathens.

THERE SEEMS TO BE SO MANY BRANCHES ON THE METAL TREE THAT ARE MOSTLY SLIGHT ADAPTATIONS OF A PREVIOUS GENRE, BUT JUST GIVEN A NEW NAME OR AN ADDED EXTENSION. WOULD YOU AGREE?

WHAT SORT OF MUSICAL BACKGROUND DOES THE BAND HAVE AND WHAT WAS THE INITIAL DRIVE FOR YOU GUYS TO START PLAYING MUSIC TOGETHER? Jason and Jesse have musical training in their respective instruments and we’ve all played in various bands before Heathens/Wildernessking. Being good friends, we came together for a mutual love of black metal and other forms of heavy music. YOUR FIRST ALBUM ‘THE WRITING OF GODS IN THE SAND’ CAME OUT PRETTY QUICKLY IN 2012, ON THE AMERICAN LABEL ANTITHETIC RECORDS, ON CD AND LP. HOW DID YOU GET CONNECTED WITH THE LABEL AND WHAT MADE YOU RELEASE ONLY ONE ALBUM WITH THEM? Shawn Sambol of Antithetic Records contacted us after he read the Lurker’s Path article. He had only put out a couple of records at the time and wanted to release our debut. We jumped at the opportunity and the first album was released on CD in February of 2012, followed by the vinyl release later in the year. We may release another record through Antithetic in the future but it’s difficult to say. It wasn’t a conscious decision to only release one album, it was just circumstance. YOUR EP ‘…AND THE NIGHT SWEPT US AWAY’ CAME OUT VERY QUICKLY AFTER THE FIRST ALBUM IN 2012 AND THEN YOU ONLY RESURFACED AGAIN WITH ‘THE DEVIL WITHIN’ IN 2014. WHAT LED TO THE LONG BREAK BETWEEN RECORDINGS? Studies, work, life... We were fairly busy in 2013 though. We spent most of the time writing our second album and completing ‘The Devil Within’ EP. We wrote Kings for the Elemental Nightmares split, we played RAMfest and we did our first tour in the winter of that year. It’s great to be able to give all aspects of the band some attention. When we returned to the studio, we had a range of new experiences to draw from. I HAVE HEARD MANY DESCRIPTIONS FOR THE TYPE OF METAL YOU’RE PLAYING AND THERE ARE SO MANY GENRES OF METAL THESE DAYS. HOW WOULD YOU PERSONALLY DESCRIBE YOUR SOUND?

tional hardcore and metal bands coming is one to be excited about, and hopefully these bands will receive the necessary support to make these tours a regular occurrence. Whether it’s backtracking or growing, the scene will remain regardless, but we see it going from strength to strength as more people abroad are introduced to ‘African’ metal. WHAT DO YOU THINK NEEDS TO BE DONE TO CREATE MORE LOCAL INTEREST IN HEAVIER MUSIC?

Yes, in some cases, definitely. In others, there’s a distinct musical difference, let’s say between black metal and death metal for example. Those subgenre pillars are important for categorical purposes and overall aesthetic. When you venture into sub-genres of sub-genres it can become slightly redundant. As long as a band is resonating with you on some level then it shouldn’t matter whether they’re a throwback heavy metal band or a space-themed psychedelic black metal band.

The mindset has to change with regards to the genre. There are local music publications, such as Platform, that embrace all styles of music. This is something that’s desperately needed to alter the minds of some people who may like heavy music, but are too intimated by it or think the image is silly and comical. International music journalism heavyweights like Stereogum and Pitchfork are leading by example, covering everything from black metal to rap.

THERE SEEMS TO BE QUITE A FEW AFRICAN METAL AND PUNK BANDS SEEPING THROUGH THE CRACKS LEFT BY DANCE MUSIC THROUGHOUT THE CONTINENT. DO YOU SEE A LOT MORE BLACK KIDS GETTING INTO METAL IN THE FUTURE AND HOW DO YOU THINK IT WILL INFLUENCE THE MOVEMENT AND THE MUSIC?

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO RE-RELEASE THE EP ‘…AND THE NIGHT SWEPT US AWAY’ ONTO TAPE THROUGH GRIMOIRE CASSETTE CVLTURE? UNDERSTANDABLY IT’S FINE TO RELEASE MUSIC ON LP AGAIN BUT DO YOU THINK THE TAPE CULTURE WILL MAKE AS BIG A COMEBACK AS VINYL CULTURE?

Oh yeah, because more and more African people are being exposed to the genre, as it makes its way into every crevice of the globe. It will no doubt influence the movement in a positive way, as this music should never be race specific. The brother/ sisterhood aspect of metal culture is a wonderful thing and the more multi-ethnic, the merrier. It’s time to break down those silly misconceptions. There’s a lot of African history that is dying to be tapped into, both on a thematic and musical level. The combination of traditional African music and heavy metal will certainly make for an interesting and fresh perspective, with some bands already making use of this unique musical combination. The future is bright.

Even though we’re a South African band, our audience is global. That’s the beauty of the international metal scene. If people love what you’re doing, they will support your band. It’s a loyal movement. So, where tape culture is almost non-existent in our country (for now), it’s thriving in the underground and always has been, much like vinyl culture. Within the DIY punk/hardcore/metal scene these things have always been a staple for the music nerd in his/ her bedroom.

WHY DO YOU THINK METAL AND HEAVY MUSIC GENRES ARE STILL SO FROWNED UPON AND STILL HAVE SUCH NEGATIVE CONNOTATIONS ATTACHED?

Currently, it’s in the post-production phase. Incorporating all we learned from the first full-length, we set out to write a focused, dynamic and cohesive album, both musically and conceptually. It will be available in early 2015. All that’s left to do is sort out the finer details. MOST OF YOUR PREVIOUS RECORDINGS ARE DISTRIBUTED BY DIFFERENT LABELS AND COMPANIES. DOES THIS GET DIFFICULT TO MANAGE AND HAVE YOU HAD ANY REALISTIC OFFERS MADE BAY ANY LABELS ABROAD SO FAR?

It’s simply a matter of education. People have this perception that if you play metal then you’re angry and hate the world. That’s the general consensus, but what they seem to forget is that metal is a genre, just like pop and hip-hop. Each style has its musical traits and some are more aggressive or passive than others. Things are changing though, thanks to music publications and blogs that are covering all types of music on the basis that it’s good, not whether it’s metal or electronic or indie or whatever. It’s not important. Good music is music that moves you, regardless of labels or constraints. THERE SEEMS TO BE QUITE A FEW MORE ‘HARD’ INTERNATIONAL BANDS TOURING THROUGH THE COUNTRY AGAIN, DO YOU SEE AN UPRISE FOR HEAVIER MUSIC COMING OR DO YOU THINK IT WILL KEEP ON SLOWLY GROWING AT ITS OWN PACE? We sure hope so. The prospect of all these interna-

GUYS DECIDE TO GO MORE OF A CREATIVE ROUTE WITH YOUR ALBUM RELEASES? Something we’ve always held in high regard is exclusivity, making each piece of music or merchandise as unique as possible. It was never our initial intention to have different covers for each format of every release. Well, it’s part accident and part deliberate. Now that we’ve carved this path, it gives us the opportunity to work with more people and to have different artists interpret the music in their unique way. THE BAND HAS HAD SOME AMAZING ALBUM COVER ART, HOW DID YOU COME ABOUT WORKING WITH SO MANY DIFFERENT ARTISTS OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF YEARS? Thank you. E-mailing and networking has been our mantra from the very beginning. We are always surprised at the response we receive when we contact a favourite artist of ours. From Pierre Perichaud being a big fan, to how humble and kind an artist like Reuben Sawyer is, it’s thrilling to be a part of that inspiring and talented fold. AS FAR AS TOURING GOES, ARE THERE ANY PLANS FOR THE BAND TO BE ON THE MOVE LOCALLY AND / OR ABROAD WITH THE NEW ALBUM? Definitely! We have plans for both and we hope to execute them. Thanks for your interest!

DISCOGRAPHY WILDERNESSKING The Writing of Gods in the Sand 2012 / Antithetic Records / CD / LP

YOUR NEW ALBUM IS CURRENTLY UNDERWAY, MUSICALLY WHAT CAN BE EXPECTED FROM IT, WHEN WILL IT BE AVAILABLE AND WILL YOU BE WORKING ALONGSIDE ANY LABELS AGAIN ON THE RELEASE?

It’s easy to manage as we’ve always been on the same page as the people we’re working with, like Grimoire and Antithetic for example. Expectations are outlined from the start, so everyone knows what they’re supposed to handle and oversee. We have had some offers, but we’re still taking things as they come.

WILDERNESSKING ...And the Night Swept Us Away 2012 / Independent / CD / CASS

WILDERNESSKING The Devil Within 2014 / Roastin Records / CD / LP / CASS

ALL THE ALBUM RELEASES, WHETHER THEY ARE ON CD, LP OR CASSETTE, HAVE DIFFERENT GRAPHICS AND PACKAGING. MOST OTHER BANDS WILL STICK WITH JUST ONE COVER PER RECORDING. WHAT MADE YOU

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print run REVIEWS - XAVIER NAGEL

SUPPLIED BY - BIBLIOPHELIA

Inkslingers: Under the Skin The Fashion Book Black Antoinette (GESTALTEN) Olaf Hajek is one of the world’s most successful and well-known illustrators and have exhibited in Cape Town in the recent past. Black Antoinette (GESTALTEN) collects his most recent editorial contracts and commercial portraits and showcases his characteristic style, “infused with a folkloristic naivety and freshness” in this hardcover R790 eye-candy of a book. Personal favourites that appear in BA are covers he did for Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are not the only fruit and Sexing the cherry.

BIBLIOPHILIA / WOODSTOCK Bibliophilia is owned by Xavier Nagel who has enslaved himself to the book industry for his entire adult life. It is difficult to tell the difference between his lounge and his bookshop, in fact if you would like access to the mind of Xavier Nagel, then visit Bibliophilia. At times scary, but never dull.not the only fruit and Sexing the cherry.

Marvel Comics 75 Years of Cover Art

The Mammoth Book of Skulls

Marvel Comics 75 Years of Cover Art (DK) is a beautiful, large-scale book that celebrates the most “impactful, inspiring and unusual comic cover art” in Marvel’s first 75 years. Featuring fan favourite superheroes like Spider Man, Iron Man and the Avengers along the people who brought them to life like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, this R750 320 page monster comes in a slipcase with two amazing prints.

The Mammoth Book of Skulls (ROBINSON) explores the skull from fashion to street art. This R320 paperback collects the most “engaging and intriguing images of the skull from pop culture around the world”. Images of skulls from graphic novels, manga, graphic design, art, costume, make-up, vintage advertising and popular culture abound between these 446 pages. A selection of chapters include the following: Art Skulls, Designer Skulls, Illustrated Skulls, Skull Fashion, Cartoon Cute Skulls, Street Art Skulls, Tattoo Skulls, Rock N Roll Skulls and Skullpture. There’s even a skull shaped with condoms and of course no book on Skulls would be complete without Skeletor!

(DK)

As Adi Granov states in the foreword: “… covers have traditionally…served as an advertisement for what is inside, but along the way they developed a parallel life of their own.

(ROBINSON)

(PHAIDON) “… That singular business that lives somewhere between art and commerce” introduces The Fashion Book (PHAIDON), a hefty tome that’s de rigueur for any fashionista! Stretching over two hundred years, from A to Z, this objet d’art covers close to 600 “clothing and accessory designers, photographers, stylists, schools, models and editors – as well as the fashion icons who instigated or symbolise an entire style or movement.” Models will need to use both arms to hold 576 glossy pages of fabulousness! A comprehensive cross-referencing system and index highlights the fashion industry’s connections and collaborations, TFB will deliver much more than it’s R795 price tag. Darling, we’re not kidding… Get this book!

(GINGKO PRESS) Inkslingers: Under the Skin (GINGKO PRESS) by Jakob Schultz and Michael Caddy Sondergaard feature over 20 contemporary tattoo artists from around the world (locals like Derek Baker from Metal Machine Tattoo and Body Piercing in Cape Town also puts in an appearance). Portraits of every tattoo artist are interspersed with images of them at work and examples of their work, ranging from tribal to Japanese style with a lot of metal imagery in between. Each artist tells the story of their first tattoo, experiences had and lessons learned. A common theme is the fact that you have to be a good artist if you want to become a great tattoo artist. The riot of colour and styles on display in this book helps to soften the blow of the eye-watering selling price of R990.

They started to be framed as standalone posters, collected as pieces of fine art, and came to be seen by artists themselves as their opportunity to push a bit farther and show their best work; the covers became just as iconic as the characters they were depicting.”

www.bibliophilia.co.za

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Color Me Graffiti 2 Die Avonture van Malboer (SELF PUBLISHED)

Die Avonture van Malboer self-published by author, musician Johan Jack Smith is a R179 local graphic novel done in the retro-style of pulp “foto verhale” like Die Wit Tier, Grensvegter and Ruiter in Swart, familiar to anyone growing up in Mzansi in the 70’s and 80’s. Stating clearly on the cover that it’s NOT for sensitive readers, the story follows the bloody revenge road trip of Ignatius Malboer Bierman, accompanied by his two trusty Barettas “Kerkorrel” and “Kombuis”, on the trail of the faceless “Firm”. If Quentin Tarantino was born in Benoni, this is what Kill Bill could have looked like! 52

(GESTALTEN)

The Evil Garden (POMEGRANATE) “A happy, naïve family enters The Evil Garden (POMEGRANATE) to spend a sunny afternoon in its sublime and inviting landscape, plush with exotic trees and flowers. They soon realize their mistake, as harrowing sounds and evidence of foul play emerge.” This sweetly sinister Edward Gorey R115 hardcover is drawn in his signature crosshatch style and the enganging couplets will have you gasping with ghoulish guffaws. First published in 1965 the shrewd Gorey “leads us through his nefarious garden with a light step.” If you’re not familiar with Gorey, who died in 2000, this is the perfect start. THE LAKE

Color Me Graffiti 2 (FROM HERE TO FAME PUBLISHING) is a coloring book for creative kids of all ages. With A4 “pieces” printed on only one side of the paper, successful works can be framed to impress grandma! The freshest graffiti styles, characters and illustrations are from mainly German graffiti writers and street artists. In the introduction to this R125 book Don “STONE” Karl and Akim “ZEBSTER” Walta talks about how “today, most kids are heavily influenced by digital media entertainment and they lose their instinctive skills to be creative on their own. We see a big need to change and develop the educational system to find new ways to prepare young people for the challenges of our fast changing world.” Are you listening Angie Motshekga?

The Five Magic Pebbles and other stories (SELF PUBLISHED)

The Five Magic Pebbles and other stories by Don Mattera with artwork by Matthew Hindley is an anthology of African tales “written with lyrical charm by South Africa’s proclaimed “Bard of Liberation”. Originally available in the early 90’s ROBIN RHODE has republished Mattera’s “mythical stories” with original artwork by Matthew Hindley. These five stories “reflect the innocence of imagination that is deeply embedded in the social fabric of South Africa, and continues to act as a cultural barometer as the country celebrates its 20th year of democracy.” This breathtaking R285 book with a printed hardcover comes with a ribbon and is perfect for sharing with the younger ones.

DAVID SOUTHWOOD / Memory Card Sea Power

Memory Card Sea Power with photographs by and published by DAVID SOUTHWOOD is a R200 broadsheet newspaper that documents Tanzanian stowaways living under the N1 in Cape Town. Printed with a single colour, black, MCSP mirrors the hard, monotonous, grey underpass life of the stowaways.

the paper is disassembled it can be reconstituted as a series of posters and very large photographs.” This is an affordable work of art by one of SA’s most exciting photographers. www.davesouthwood.com Contact: www.bibliophilia.co.za

The text is by Sean Christie and pidgin Swahili graffiti is layed-out in big black League Gothic by master designer Francois Rey. “Many of the newspaper’s 12 flat A1s are parts of composite photographs which means that a start-to-finish reading of the paper renders the life of the stowaways in a jerky, heroin-ripped collage. When

R5400

R6900

Rega RP1

R9000

Pro-Ject Essential II

Sota Moonbeam II

(Acrylic platter sold separately)

ALL TURNTABLES INCLUDE THE TONERAM, CARTRIDGE AND A PERSPEX COVER

SHOP 012 THE SQUARE, CAPE QUARTER LIFESTYLE VILLAGE, SOMERSET ROAD, GREEN POINT, CAPE TOWN TEL / FAX - 021 418 4379

CELL - 083 282 4256

WEB - www.thelisteningroom.co.za

MAIL - rodney@thelisteningroom.co.za 53

wax junkie ALL RECORDS AVAILABLE AT - THE LISTENING ROOM www.thelisteningroom.co.za

Public Image Limited First Issue 1978 - Virgin

Aphex Twin SYRO 2014 - Warp

BEASTIE BOYS SOLID GOLD HITS 2005 - Capitol Records

BOMBINO NOMAD 2013 - Nonesuch

King Krule 6 Feet Beneath The Moon 2013 - XL

M.I.A. ARULAR 2005 -XL

DELUXE (180G LP) - R520

(3LP) - R500

(2LP) - R365

(1LP) -R330

(2LP) - R355

(1LP) - R245

Public Image Limited’s First Issue (aka Public Image) was an album that helped set the pace for what eventually became known as post-punk. Disheartened owing to events in his legal proceedings against the Sex Pistols management company Glitterbest, and disgusted by the punk scene in general, Lydon was determined to create something that was neither punk nor even really rock as it was known in 1978. Working with ex-Clash guitarist Keith Levene, first-time bassist Jah Wobble, and Canadian drummer Jim Walker, Public Image Limited produced an album that represented the punk sound after it had shot itself in the head and became another entity entirely.

Thirteen years passed between Drukqs and Syro, the fifth and sixth Aphex Twin albums. The long stretch, however, wasn’t short on new material from Richard D. James. From 2005 through early 2014, the frequently dazzling Analord EPs (all but one of which was credited to AFX), an EP and LP as the Tuss, and a liberated Caustic Window LP all reached the public. In August 2014, a nylon Aphex blimp -- not quite as immense as the S.O.S. Band’s presumably decommissioned aircraft, yet transfixing nonetheless -- was spotted over London, and the following month, Syro arrived on Warp. Low on frenetics, Syro is anchored by rotund and agile basslines that zip and glide, and it’s decked in accents and melodies that are lively even at their most distressed.

The Beastie Boys had a good, albeit eccentric, hits compilation in 1999 with the double-disc set The Sounds of Science, so what’s the purpose of the 2005 set Solid Gold Hits? Well, it is considerably more concise than the previous compilation, spanning just one disc and containing a mere 15 songs compared to the 42 on Sounds. So, for listeners who are just looking for the big hits, this serves its purpose quite well, since this may be missing many great songs -- and not just album tracks or early singles like “She’s on It,” but charting hits like “Paul Revere” -- but it does have all of their anthems, including “Fight for Your Right,” “Brass Monkey,” “Hey Ladies,” “Shake Your Rump,” “So What’cha Want,” “Sabotage,” “Sure Shot,”...

Born in northern Niger, Bombino is an ethnic Tuareg, a nomadic tribe spread out across the Sahara Desert, and if he inherited a steady urge for going, it shows in his guitar playing, which is informed by the fluid, melodic, and graceful style of so many great African guitarists. But he’s also listened and studied the playing of Jimi Hendrix and Mark Knopfler closely, and maybe a little of J.J. Cale, too, another man whose guitar style embraces a sharp, dusty-tinged desert tone, and somehow out of all this, Bombino emerges as a sort of Dick Dale of the Sahara, with a guitar style that is uniquely all his own. For the second album, he traveled to Nashville and the result is a marvelous set, full of grit and funky elegance

Not since Rick Astley has a voice seem so mismatched with a body. King Krule’s 6 Feet Beneath the Moon features one Archy Marshall, a 19-year-old with the baby-faced looks of a young Ron Howard, who possesses a huge growling baritone that is earthshaking and soulful. Wisely, his beguiling voice is mixed prominently in his debut, up front, to place an accent on his dexterous, streetwise lyrics and the emotional details in his delivery. With a snarling, Billy Idol intensity, Archy sings like the type of kid who would be quick to throw a punch without asking questions. The nature of his songs, which are built from the ground up from a guitar plugged clean into a Twin Reverb, and a love of jazz-style major seventh chords.

A cursory listen to Arular makes one wonder how it could generate so much heated, in-depth talk, as it did well before its official release. This is very direct and physical party music, with lots of slang-filled phrasings that might not have any more meaning than “The roof is on fire!” or “Dizzouble dizzutch!” to Americans. It’s music that is conducive to dancing or doing other carefree things in the sunshine, rather than what you should hear most often through feeble computer speakers in dimly lit rooms. The blend of styles -- a dense, often chaotic collage of garage from the U.K., dancehall from Jamaica, crunk from the Dirty South, electro and hardcore rap from New York, and glints of a few others

POGUES RUM, SODOMY AND THE LASH 1985 - Stiff Records (180g LP) - R295

“I saw my task... was to capture them in their delapidated glory before some more professional producer f--ked them up,” Elvis Costello wrote of his role behind the controls for the Pogues’ second album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash. One spin of the album proves that Costello accomplished his mission; this album captures all the sweat, fire, and angry joy that was lost in the thin, disembodied recording of the band’s debut, and the Pogues sound stronger and tighter without losing a bit of their edge in the process. Rum Sodomy & the Lash also found Shane MacGowan growing steadily as a songwriter.

foo fighterS mania

SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE THERE’S A RIOT GOIN’ ON 1970 - Epic (180G 45RPM 2LP) - R690 It’s easy to write off There’s a Riot Goin’ On as one of two things -Sly Stone’s disgusted social commentary or the beginning of his slow descent into addiction. It’s both of these things, of course, but pigeonholing it as either winds up dismissing the album as a whole, since it is so bloody hard to categorize. What’s certain is that Riot is unlike any of Sly & the Family Stone’s other albums, stripped of the effervescence that flowed through even such politically aware records as Stand!, as hope is slowly replaced by cynicism, joy by skepticism, enthusiasm by weariness, sex by pornography, thrills by narcotics. Joy isn’t entirely gone -- it creeps through the cracks every once and awhile and, more disturbing, Sly revels in his stoned decadence. 54

SUN RA OUTER SPACEWAYS INCORPORATED 2014 - ORG Music

Black Flag SLIP IT IN 1984 - SST

FOO FIGHTERS FOO FIGHTERS 1995 - Capitol Records

- R420 / 1500 copies world wide!

- R315

- R280

Sun Ra’s orchestra was at its most radical during this period, alternating simple chants with very outside playing and dense ensembles. While the sidemen include such notables as Marshall Allen and Danny Davis on altos, baritonist Pat Patrick, John Gilmore on tenor, bassist Ronnie Boykins and percussionist Clifford Jarvis, most of the other players in the 15-piece band (such as trumpeters Ahk Tal Ebah and Kwame Hadi) have slipped back into obscurity. This music is quite intriguing, although it requires an open mind and a sense of humor to fully appreciate.

Slip It In followed My War almost immediately, and while a bit better (fewer mega-volume angst drones), the band still wanders a bit, experimenting with expanding the breadth of hardcore into a newer hard rock/ punk sound. This is especially true of Greg Ginn’s guitar playing, which was becoming increasingly avant-garde and exciting. Rather than simply coughing up one clichéd solo after another, he wandered harmolodically up and down the fretboard as a jazz player like Blood Ulmer would, making the material more interesting than what most Black Flag-influenced bands were playing.

Essentially a collection of solo home recordings by Dave Grohl, Foo Fighters’ eponymous debut is a modest triumph. Driven by big pop melodies and distorted guitars, Foo Fighters do strongly recall Nirvana, only with a decidedly lighter approach. If Kurt Cobain’s writing occasionally recalled John Lennon, Dave Grohl’s songs are reminiscent of Paul McCartney -- they’re driven by large, instantly memorable melodies, whether it’s the joyous outburst of “This Is a Call” or the gentle pop of “Big Me.” That doesn’t mean Grohl shies away from noise; toward the end of the record, he piles on several thrashers that make more sense as pure aggressive sound than as songs.

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FOO FIGHTERS There Is Nothing Left To Lose 1999 - Roswell Records

FOO FIGHTERS IN YOUR HONOR 2005 - Roswell Record

(2LP) - R395

(2LP) R395

Foo Fighters were the most unexpectedly mercurial band in ‘90s rock, boasting a different lineup for each of their three albums. The ever-shifting membership didn’t help erase the image that the group was merely a vehicle for Dave Grohl, and made it seem like Grohl was something of a dictator, at least to some biased outside observers. That’s why their third record, There Is Nothing Left to Lose, comes as somewhat of a surprise. It is the first Foo Fighters album that sounds like the work of a unified, muscular band, and the first one that rocks really hard. A lot of credit should go to Adam Kasper, who produced the record with the band.

Although it was as big a commercial success as Foo Fighters’ three previous albums, 2002’s One by One seemed flat and tired, as if their leader, Dave Grohl, had reached a songwriting slump or as if the band had exhausted its possibilities. The time was ripe for a reinvention, or at least a risk, and the group responded accordingly with In Your Honor, a double album containing one disc of hard rock and one disc of acoustic material. Splitting music along such a clear dividing line is dangerous: since each disc explores one specific territory, each could sound monochromatic, but instead of falling into this trap, Foo Fighters benefit from these self-imposed constraints.

FOO FIGHTERS Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace 2007 - Roswell Record - R315

It’s not quite right to say that the Foo Fighters only have one sound, but why does it always feel like the group constantly mines the same sonic vein? Even on 2007’s Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace -- their sixth album and first with producer Gil Norton since their second, 1997’s The Colour and the Shape -- the Foos feel familiar, although the group spends some palpable energy weaving together the two sides of their personality that they went out of their way to separate on 2005’s In Your Honor, where they divided the set into a disc of electric rockers and a disc of acoustic introspection.

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CLOBBER

21 12

23 24 8

1 QVANS / STRIPE T / 2 DIAMOND / SEX DRUGS & RAP / 3 QUIKSILVER / TOo COOL / 4 HUF / TRIANGLE RAGLAN / 5 dope / Sunflower’ Button up shirt / 6 VANS / SHORT S BUTTON / 7 DIAMOND / Statesman / 8 ELEMENT / SHORTSs / 9 ELEMENT / SHORTS / 10 QUIKSILVER / board shorts / wallet / 11 HUF / FLORAL DUFFLE / 12 HUF / box logo / 13 HUF / SPLATTER BUCKET / 14 DIAMOND / Co Trillian / 15 DIAMOND / Bucket Hat / 16 VANS / TWO TONE SHADES / 17 adidas / adilette Blue / 18 HUF / CAMERA CASE / 19 ANTI HERO / RETRO B / 20 HUF / FUCK IT CRUISER / 21 ZIP ZINGER / WHEELS /22 INDIPENDENT/ TRUCKS / 23 DIAMOND / Hardware / 24 DIAMOND / BEARINGS / 25 DIAMOND /risers / 26 HUF / IPHONE 5 cover / 27 huf / plantlife socks 56

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the sun sets in the west 1

16 13

1 rvca - bikini / 2 MAROONING - FUCK / 3 LISP - joplin / 4 BABETTE - VINTAGE ONE PIECE / 5 ADIDAS ORININALS - T SHIRT / 6 rvca - Megafauna Shorts / 7 ROXY - Tropical Getaway 8 STANCE - SOCKS / 9 ROXY - WALLET / 10 BABETTE - VINTAGE BOOTS / 11 VANS - tobacco / 12 W35T - SUMMER DRESS / 13 MOMO - BAG / 14 DBLANC - SUNGLASSES 15 ADIDAS ORININALS - adilette Black / 16 Lomography- la-sardina-champaigne / 17 SIMON & MARY - Leah / 18 VON ZIPPER - karmic 58

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PLIMSOLL

HUF / CHOICE BLACK CAMO

HUF / GALAXY BROWN LEATHER

HUF / RAMONDETTA PRO CAMO

HUF / GENUINE IVORY BLOSSOM

HUF / HUPPER SHELL SHOCK

HUF / MERCER DEEP NAVY

NIKE / Dunk High Tie Dye

NIKE / Janoski PR Tie Dye QS

DC / COUNCIL MID

DC / NYJAH

ETNIES / jameson-2-eco-navy

ETNIES / marana-navy-grey-gum

VANS / sk8 hi

VANS / Floral Authentic

VANS / AUTHENTIC

CONVERSE / Weapon

CONVERSE / SWeapon

CONVERSE / Weapon

CONVERSE / ALL STAR 12

CONVERSE / AERO JAM LEATHER

CONVERSE / Weapon Skate

ADIDAS / ZX EF

ADIDAS / ZX 500 2.0

ADIDAS / Honey 2.0

ADIDAS / Honey Hook

ADIDAS / BANKSHOT FREESTYLE

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Dope Industries / WWW.DOPEIND.COM ‘Aqua’ Boxer shorts /‘Aqua’ Button up shirt / Dope Industries 5 Panel cap / Jeanos ‘Workshop’ Beanie / Dope Industries ‘Leaf’ Bucket hat / Dope Industries ‘Diamond’ Socks

STYLING - KRISTI VLOK 64

PHOTOGRAPHY - ADRIAAN LOUW THE LAKE