If Walls Could Talk Would They Sing?
In June this year I was approached by Renée Holleman to collaborate on a soundtrack for her upcoming show ‘A Novel in Parts’ at WhatIfTheWorld’s new premises in Woodstock, Cape Town.
The brief she gave me proved to be a great opportunity to explore Woodstock, the neighbourhood Masha and I had just moved into, as well as a useful challenge for my compositional techniques.
This is the final soundtrack:
Woodstock is today primarily a Moslem community with a growing immigrant population from other parts of Africa, but up until the 1940’s it was a Jewish neighbourhood of Lithuanian decent. Renee explained that the show would touch on specific and tangential references to this context, especially as the exhibition was to take place in the old Woodstock Salt River Synagogue complex – the Hebrew Community Hall having been converted into the new gallery premises.
[See more images from the show here.]
She also explained that the soundtrack would need to have a clear link to the current context but also in some way evoke the past – and use sound to achieve this. The starting point would be the location of the exhibition – the Synagogue complex, which had been de-consecrated in the late 1950’s, and had seen a number of other occupants, including a bicycle repair shop and a furniture manufacturer. (more…)
Workshop: Making Useful Instruments
I’m going to be running a workshop focusing on building and playing stringed instruments made from found objects.
Based on traditional (and not so traditional) African instruments such as harps, fiddles, lutes – made from tins, cardboard tubes, boxes, and any suitable odd but useful object.
In the first session we’ll explore (more…)
Jacques van Zyl and the Wynberg String Accelerator
My collaborations with Jacques go back to our first meeting at the Unyazi Electronic music festival (Joburg 05).
I’d created a work for the festival called CMYK, based on an analysis of a visual work by Paul Edmunds – a rather long winded live Audiomulch and Mandolin performance , which met with an unexpectedly enthusiastic audience response (my immediate thought “I’ve sold out!”).
The next day I ran a workshop and afterwards had a long chat with this very polite man who confessed to have recorded my performance and professed that he was a ‘flight attendant’ quickly following that with (in case there was any confusion) ‘you know – like an air hostess’, but also that he built speakers and amplifiers and wasn’t planning to stay in his present high flying occupation for long.
He didn’t and instead went on to resign and put all of his energies into developing Phi Audio, his bespoke speaker company. And we continued to correspond and, where possible, when Jacques was in town, to dabble in a range of audio experiments including (more…)
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