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from 舟渺渺
斯坦利醒来时身边床铺是凉的。
昨晚临睡前丈夫和他说今天是圣诞节他们得一起回家一趟，他嗯了一声表示自己知道，这是一贯的传统。每年温菲尔德夫妇的生日或是圣诞节时他们总会回家一趟，而温菲尔德夫妇待他向来很好，他当然也提前为他们准备了礼物。只是每次面对他们时斯坦利总有点莫名的心虚，他与赛诺已经结婚五年，外人看来他们相敬如宾从不吵架，实在是让人羡慕的夫妻，然而只有斯坦利才知道这段婚姻有多煎熬。
毫无疑问，赛诺是所有人眼中的完美丈夫。他英俊潇洒年收入稳定，待人接物彬彬有礼，他清楚记得斯坦利的生日、记得他们的周年纪念日，他会挑选一束漂亮的花和昂贵的礼物送给斯坦利。
斯坦利理应毫无怨言，可赛诺太无聊了——他的丈夫像是被设定好程序的机器人，每天早晨七点四十起床，花费二十分钟穿衣洗漱，来到餐厅用十分钟吃完早餐后开车前往公司上班，在傍晚七点半时准时回来，偶尔公司加班他会给斯坦利发消息让他早点睡觉，他回家时动静很轻，从不会吵醒斯坦利。每天每天，周而复始都是如此。
赛诺从不会主动提出要和斯坦利性爱，但如果斯坦利有那个意思他也不会拒绝。婚前斯坦利明确表示自己不喜欢小孩，于是每次做爱时赛诺都会戴套，他们的性爱几乎毫无激情可言，比起增进夫妻关系更像是在例行公事。
赛诺当然没有出轨，不如说他对待任何事情都是这样的态度，斯坦利从未见过他生气或是恼怒的模样。就连他们初遇的那天也是如此，那时斯坦利拎着刚买的咖啡脚步匆匆不小心撞上赛诺，肉眼看就价值不菲的西装染上咖啡让斯坦利倒吸一口凉气，那时他刚工作没多久，但对方丝毫没有在意，只是用温和的语调询问他是否能帮他把脏掉的衬衫拿去附近的洗衣店。
幼年时期父母永无止尽的争吵、离婚后父亲喜怒无常的性格让斯坦利天生对于情绪稳定的人有着好感，一切仿佛是水到渠成的事情，在交往半年后赛诺和他求婚了。
那时的斯坦利心中怀揣着对幸福生活的美好向往，可是很快他就发现这段婚姻远远不如他预想中的那样甜蜜。除非他挑起话题否则赛诺从不会和他分享任何事情，当然如果他询问的话对方也会说，极大的落差让斯坦利逐渐心生不满，他当然和赛诺抱怨过，只是赛诺从不会和他争吵。
「那你想要我怎么做。」
赛诺的回答永远只有这样一句话，他的语调平静得像是在讨论今天吃什么，斯坦利对上那双毫无波澜的眼睛突然失去了所有兴趣，是的，斯坦利，你不能这样贪心，你当初喜欢赛诺的情绪稳定，那你就得永远接受他那如同死水一般的平静。
时间久了斯坦利不再执着于此，反正世界上的大部分夫妻都和他们这样过着平平无奇的生活，他不该奢求太多。
“小心点。”赛诺一手拎着礼物一手拉着斯坦利摁下门铃，温菲尔德女士看见他们来很是高兴，斯坦利露出一个微笑，微微弯腰给了温菲尔德女士一个拥抱，随即将手中的礼物递给她。
他们坐在客厅里说话，兜兜转转话题又回到孩子身上。斯坦利有些尴尬，赛诺自然地接过话题，说现在工作很忙，他们打算过几年再说。
“好吧，说起来……”
突兀响起的门铃声打断了温菲尔德女士的话，斯坦利连忙起身去开门，站在门口的年轻男人让斯坦利愣在原地，对方有着一张和他丈夫几乎一模一样的脸，对方倒是很快反应过来，主动对着他伸出手说你好，你是斯坦利吧，我是杰诺，赛诺是我哥，我听妈妈说过你的事。
杰诺的突然到来让温菲尔德女士情绪高涨，晚餐时喝了好几杯酒，直到被温菲尔德先生劝阻喝太多了才恋恋不舍地放下杯子。斯坦利坐在赛诺旁边默默听着，杰诺正在读博，前几年一直在海外跟着导师做研究，上个月才回到这里。
晚餐时赛诺也喝了不少酒，难道是因为看见弟弟很高兴吗？斯坦利不清楚，但就算赛诺不喝醉今晚他们也得留宿在这里，毕竟刚刚手机里弹出一条暴雪预警。
他搀扶着醉醺醺的赛诺回到房间里，替他换好睡衣又将一杯温水放在床边，他被累得出了一身汗，洗过澡后看了看时间还早，犹豫片刻后轻轻关上门打算去客厅待一会。
只是斯坦利没想到杰诺居然也在。
“我在飞机上睡了一觉，现在还不困。”杰诺主动和他打招呼，将一盘烤得酥脆的小饼干推到他面前，“尝尝看。”
“嗯。”斯坦利拿起一块饼干放入口中，客厅里很安静，就连窗外大雪压断树杈的声音都如此清晰。
“你和我哥结婚那会我正在和导师做一个课题，虽然我没来但妈妈给我发了很多你们结婚的照片和视频。”说到这里杰诺笑出声，“虽然我没参加，但我清楚地记得每一个流程。”
不知为何听杰诺提起婚礼的事情斯坦利的耳根有些发烫，但好在杰诺没有继续这个话题，相较于他沉默寡言的哥哥来说杰诺明显健谈许多，他和斯坦利说起他们去野外露营观测流星雨的事，说起他们做实验时因为操作失误险些把实验室炸掉，他的话语间仿佛带着一股魔力，明明两人是初次见面，听得斯坦利的嘴角不自觉翘起好看的弧度，原本紧绷的身体也逐渐放松，懒洋洋地靠在沙发上。
杰诺谈及那些晦涩难懂的科学实验时斯坦利一知半解，他并不是一个勤学好问的人，可那些词语从杰诺的嘴里说出来就是勾得他忍不住想要继续往下听。
“天啊居然已经快一点了。”杰诺伸了个懒腰，“该睡觉了，斯坦。”
时间怎么过得那么快。
斯坦利难免有些沮丧，但杰诺现在需要休息的确是事实，他总不能为了一己私欲拉着杰诺聊个通宵。他依依不舍地站起身和杰诺说晚安，随即轻手轻脚走上二楼的房间。
赛诺居然醒了。
床头灯的光线柔柔地照着，放在床头柜上的杯子已经空了，斯坦利将门关上走到床边问他感觉怎么样有没有哪里不舒服，赛诺抬头看了他一眼，突然一把拉住他的手腕将他拽到床上。
“怎……”
斯坦利还没来得及问出怎么了就被赛诺堵住，没说出口的话语就这样被硬生生咽回腹中，过去赛诺鲜少有过这样的时刻，但大多是在他工作压力极大的情况下——斯坦利讶异于赛诺的反常，却也没有推开他，只是抬起手轻轻揽住他的后背。
床头柜里既没有润滑也没有保险套，但赛诺从里面摸出了一管凡士林，他们已经很长时间没做过，斯坦利的逼紧得连一根手指都吞不进去，换做平时赛诺会极具耐心地用手指打开他的身体，但不知是不是因为喝了酒，赛诺今晚的动作格外粗鲁，在那口小逼勉强吞入两根手指后就迫不及待地提枪就上。
赛诺胯下的尺寸远远不像他的外表那样秀气，被粗长的鸡巴强行破开小逼时痛得斯坦利挤出了几滴眼泪，他错觉下半身像是被一根烧红的烙铁硬生生捅开，抓住赛诺手臂的指尖用了点力，在上面留下几道清晰的抓痕。
但斯坦利没忘记现在不在家里，虽然温菲尔德女士喝了酒在睡觉，那也并不意味着他可以肆无忌惮地发出声音，更何况今晚杰诺也在，想到这里他咬住下唇强忍住即将脱口而出的呻吟，用力到几乎要咬破嘴唇。
其实赛诺也被斯坦利夹得很难受，他好久没疼爱他的小妻子，先前好不容易被操开的逼现在箍得他头晕脑胀，好在斯坦利的敏感点比较浅，他稍微尝试着动了动腰来回擦过敏感点，垂眼看着被鸡巴强行撑开的小逼，斯坦利的逼和他本人一样漂亮，他本身体毛比较少，结婚后也一直很注重体毛管理，光溜溜的下半身就这样被男人粗硬的阴茎撑开，但这样可怜兮兮的模样非但没有激起赛诺的同情心反而让他心底的火越烧越旺。他确信今晚自己的情绪的来源于他那个一母同胞的弟弟，他们是亲兄弟，所以他当然知道杰诺看向斯坦利的眼神里蕴含着什么。
但那又怎样。赛诺伸手捏住那颗小小的阴蒂，感受着被斯坦利骤然夹紧的快感，最敏感的地方被反复触碰让斯坦利的腿不由自主地张得更开，那张被亲得略有些红肿的嘴唇一张一合地叫着他的名字，赛诺心底的欲望被缓慢填满，但他仍嫌不够，不紧不慢地反复磨着斯坦利的逼。
斯坦利快要被赛诺的动作弄到崩溃，今晚的情事太过突如其来以至于他毫无准备，偏偏这具身体在疼痛过后感受到的是铺天盖地袭来的快感。他渴求着赛诺的动作能再粗暴一点，最好将他当作飞机杯一样套弄，但赛诺偏不这样做，他被吊在高潮的边缘不上不下，身体早就软得像一滩水，全凭赛诺掐着他的腰才没整个人都陷在床单里。
“赛诺……求你、求你……”
斯坦利只觉得身体烫得厉害，声音断断续续隐约还带着几分哭腔，他的丈夫听到这句话停下动作好整以暇地看着他，贴心地替他把汗湿的刘海撩到一边，“怎么了？”
“操我……”
斯坦利顾不得什么脸面，语气直白又恳切。赛诺闻言反倒是将整根鸡巴抽了出来，骤然的空虚让斯坦利欲求不满地扭了扭腰，浪荡的样子让赛诺忍不住抬手对着他的逼狠狠拍了一巴掌，最敏感的地方骤然被这样对待让斯坦利发出一声尖叫，淫液随着赛诺的动作喷洒出来将他的手掌弄湿，他叹了口气，握住鸡巴撸动几下就再度插入不停颤抖的穴口。
兴许是因为杰诺看向斯坦利的眼神，又或者是酒精作祟，赛诺情不自禁将鸡巴捅向斯坦利的身体深处，沉浸在快感中的斯坦利压根没察觉到赛诺的动作有多危险，他已经高潮了好几次，赛诺的每一次动作都让他痉挛着潮吹出淫水。
稍微有点做过头了。
赛诺看着晕过去的斯坦利心想，他有些费劲地抱起斯坦利来到浴室分开他的双腿，明明刚刚才不知餍足地吞吃过那么粗长的东西，现在那口小逼倒是将精液好好地含在里面，赛诺手上的动作迟疑片刻，最终还是没有清理精液。
隔天斯坦利被生物钟唤醒时感觉下半身痛得厉害，他拿起手机看了一下时间，才发现居然已经十点多，与此同时赛诺的消息弹了出来，说公司有急事就先走了。
斯坦利抿抿唇，他身上干干净净想来昨晚赛诺还帮他洗了个澡，回想起昨晚的情景斯坦利有些害羞，在床上躺了会才慢吞吞起身换好衣服下楼，他没什么胃口，在厨房转了一圈打开冰箱打算给自己倒杯牛奶。
“早啊。”
骤然响起的声音吓了斯坦利一跳，手一抖险些把牛奶撒出去，他抬起头看着站在门口的杰诺，将牛奶放稳后勉强挤出一个笑，“早。”
“哥今天一大早就走了，连早餐都没来得及吃。”杰诺端着一杯咖啡慢悠悠地开口，“还真是忙啊。”
“嗯，他平时工作比较忙。”
“那你呢？”杰诺将马克杯放下看着他，“我的意思是说，你平时在做些什么？”
“我平时就……”
斯坦利一时语塞，他意识到自己完全没办法回答杰诺的问题，和赛诺结婚不久后他就辞去了之前的工作，那时的他想着得要好好照顾好丈夫才行——可短暂的热情过后迎来了平静如水的生活，他待在偌大的别墅百无聊赖，就这样盯着墙壁上的壁画发呆。
毕竟打扫卫生有家政，做饭也有保姆，其实他并不需要做什么。
“可以给自己找点事情做，斯坦。不一定非要去工作，发展一点兴趣爱好也好，你不能总是这样浪费时间。”
“浪费时间？”
斯坦利的语气逐渐冷下来，他承认自己和杰诺谈话时很开心，但这样无端的指责让他明明有些火大，“我哪里有浪费时间？”
“呃不，斯坦，我的意思是……”
“我先回去了，麻烦告诉妈妈和爸爸一声。”斯坦利将牛奶一饮而尽，顺势冲洗干净杯子后从杰诺身边离开，杰诺张了张嘴想说什么却又将话语咽了回去，只是看着斯坦利那分明有些别扭的走路姿势若有所思。
from hypocritepoet
#Broken Toys
Better one than the other.
The lion had always believed he was untouchable.
Then came the old man, diabetic, blind in a sugar-induced comma, drifting across the solid yellow line.
Then came the crash.
Chemical baths and broken bones.
Steel folded, glass shattered, pride crumpled beside the road. A roaring king became silent metal, while a tiny green logo still clung to the door, alive.
People walked past and only saw a wreck. They couldn't see the decades to come. The infections. The amputations. The surgery after surgery. And the losses unintended and unexpected.
But they came nonetheless. The hurt and loss.
A lion may look mighty, but it's the one who keeps breathing that gets another sunrise.
This image was 20-ish years ago... teh lion lives, but walks with a limp and is more broken every day.
The Price of Reverence
from AnOublietteofThought
Long, I wait, a speck of sparkle stirred amongst the gravel of space. Inconsequential. Temperate. Tempestuously tedious in the crass unnerving of my all. Such bleak hearkening rivals an affront to ingenuity's static pace— in this race against the razing of grace
I have become displaced...
Misplaced? Encased within the luxe absence of time, and trussed to starve oblique revival as nothing more than ornamental sludge.
Begrudge me not this tumbled farce.
Once, I fell to fan flayed fire. Twice, I sank to drown thoughts a scatter. Now I climb, a persecuted Adder multiplying the only frame I've stake to endow...
Long, I wait.
Written July 24, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.
from Faucet Repair
23 July 2026
Autopsy (working title, maybe Even odds): a small 8x10 inch painting of what began from close observation of a peeling decorative vinyl number I saw on a Wood Green bin and became a kind of totem upright in the night (memories of standing at the base of Sankaty Head Light). Or a garden and a butterfly/a promise of a garden and a projection of a butterfly/an environment and a visitor/a simulated environment and an apparition/memory shifting into two dimensions from three. Or two fates. Serendipitously found a wax seal on an old envelope as the impulse to add an insect in flight arrived (keep everything around, keep everything around). Yena said she has been writing about seeing cicada shells on the ground in her neighborhood. I could also say that this work feels like childhood given new tools, or a compressed and frozen metamorphosis, or a record of an imprinting. Content is coming around slowly (by which I mean I'm not even considering it anymore), but the materiality needs to catch up to it. I'll let this one stand regardless—it's an okay waypoint and painting is logrolling.
“As a very young man he had spoken of his art as “andacht zum kleinen” (devotion to small things). In the Microcosm of his own visual world he worshipped the Macrocosm of the universe. This was his revolution.” – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy on Paul Klee in the introduction to Praeger Publishers' 1972 print of his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).
Fresh Fruit for Rotten Vegetables
from archive roger graeme young
On the road to nowhere with Fruits & Veggies, Durban's favourite Afropunk flops.
By ROGER YOUNG
Photographs by KEVIN GOSS-ROSS
“Are we getting the cover? I wanna do a rail off my own face,” says Loopy, Fruits & Veggies' self-proclaimed “racist bassist” and co-songwriter of dubious sexual definition. Loopy is the frontline of the band's publicity-generating machine. Sure, it's not the Idols brand of PR that the Fruits generate, but even someone as bullshit-brained as Gareth Cliff would be able to spot their X, or XXX, factor. Stories of degradation follow the Fruits like the bad smell of Splashy Fen's shit-smeared backstage couch. “Yeah, that couch,” says Purity Mkhize, the tiny bleached-headed, gold-toothed lead singer. “It's why we were banned from Splashy the first time.”
Less discussed is Fruits & Veggies' music, and how they've managed to survive so long causing so much mayhem, gaining such a reputation, while pretty much staying put in Durban, recording nothing beyond a single EP, Ndaa, just on two years ago. The answer is as simple as the construction of their maskandi-gypsy ska songs: they have a unique on-stage chemistry and the confidence of a band that has discovered some kind of meaning from all this rooting around in the compost of rock'n'roll. “I'm living on Gay-reth's couch because of the band. My parents' place is far, down the coast. So I live here, because this is where my band is,” says Loopy. “This is my life, I don't really have any other options. I'm not exactly employable.” Gay-reth is part of the F&V extended family, a dangerously smart professor whose house functions as a relative safe zone when the kids are down and out; if hanging out with a sexually ambiguous anarchist is any definition of a safe zone. The extended family is a big part of Fruits & Veggies.
Fruits & Veggies are more lifestyle choice than band; they don't have groupies, they have extra members. They've left songs abandoned in studios like unwanted children, while they've stalked off after drugs, girls, freedoms and destructions in all the small shitty bars you can imagine. Yet, after nearly six years of the perpetual “tour” of Durban, they're still going, and they still haven't properly pinned down their brand of mutiny in the shape of a recorded thing. That few people will allow them into their studio for fear of breakage won't make it easy. Look, it's déclassé for a journalist to insert himself into the story, but I have a personal connection; I mean, Loopy once pissed in my luggage. Not on, but in my luggage.
Fruits & Veggies started out as an all-girl band, the brainchild of Similo Gcingoba, Durban's self-styled foremost underground film-maker. Purity is the only member of the band left from this incarnation. There were pregnancies and jealousies, one of the girls wanted her boyfriend in the band and Similo quit or got bored or declared a revolution or some bullshit lost in the mists of recent time. Says Purity: “It became a huge mess, then those two waai'ed. And it was just me and Daryn Higginson, and somehow we became part of the pub scene, which is where we met Loopy, who then spoke to Lu [Dolphin], and that was the band for a few years.”
The pub scene she's referring to is The Winston, a rathole of a venue that's been the nexus of Durban's young punk and metal bands for the last 15 years, at least. It's just on the wrong side of town, on the edge of Umbilo, Glenwood, and a couple of blocks from the docks, in a building that once housed the first incarnation of the now defunct Burn. The Winston has been the sole survivor in the building for a while, until Origin, a dance music club, opened upstairs. Origin is part of the reason the Veggies no longer perform there. Loopy and James Cross (their guitarist of three years, Daryn's replacement and now chief riff-maker) were banned from the venue for throwing empty quart bottles up at the Origin entrance. “It needed to be done,” says Loopy. “I mean fuck those guys! Rave music? They should be ashamed.”
“It's more than that, though,” says Purity. “We don't necessarily want to play there anymore. It's one of the things we've promised ourselves that we'll never do again. The sound is shit, and there is just so much whack history in that space.” She pauses, quick to correct my coming assumption: “It's not like I'm trying to leave pub life behind… I'll always be a flop. I still go to the pub, I just won't play there.”
Loopy nods. “If people are seeing you every weekend, it takes away the effect, and you get less people at your shows. It was important to play every show for a long time, to get our name out there, and now that it is out there and thrown in the dirt, it's time to limit the gigs. But it was necessary for us to go through that, because that's where you learn your chops, that's where you pay your dues. Or the Jews, that's when you pay the Jews. That's where you learn don't get too drunk before the show or you'll miss your bass string. You need these learning curves. Some people don't, but me, I'm a slow learner.”
She pauses. “And besides, when we played at The Winston, we'd each get R30 a gig. So now we don't do poephol shows anymore. There is also the important thing that we have become better songwriters; we don't have four tempo changes in the same song. But playing in front of the same 20 people every weekend, it's not good for the band, or for the audience.
“We've got to get over being that drunk band with that drunk history that fucks up guest slots.” She slips into reminiscence mode: “I don't think Lark will ever play with us ever again, and,” she grins, “frankly I don't give a fuck. We were late for sound check and we got bounced off the bill and then we were drunk and we had a bet to see who could make out with [vocalist] Inge [Beckmann]. But it kind of turned into who could grab her breast but no way, I said, that chick is staunch, I wouldn't fuck with her, and Pure would probably win. So not only did we flop from the gig, we floppped from offending Inge.”
It's hard to be a musician in Durban. There are few venues and an even smaller audience to go around. Apart from The Winston which holds about 100 people, the only other real venue is LIVE, which is on the opposite end of the spectrum, and is hard to fill, even for touring bands. Part of the problem is Durban's long-settled audience apathy. In the smaller venue, the same bands play too often; in the larger venues, people would moan about prices, but the legendary and short-lived UNIT 11 changed all that. Andrew Loubser from LIVE sums it up: “Okes are finally coming out of their shells and realising that it's worth spending the money, that our bands are good, and we have UNIT to thank for that.” Loubser has recently come round to supporting Fruits & Veggies, having had them play the venue regularly. But he's not always been a fan. “Never in my life would I have booked them. Before, they were just amped to play a gig and get fucked, but I don't know what's happened, now they're unstoppable.”
In Durban, bands start up and die fast. Of all the bands that started up at the same time as F&V, only one other survives – the radio-punk Anti Retro Vinyls. While Durban is a great place to incubate ideas, it's not a great place to execute them. “It's a lot easier to survive in Durban without any income than any other city,” explains Loopy. “There is a lot more understanding toward broke people here… It's easier that way for artists and whatever to start out here. It's not like Jo'burg or Cape Town where you need a job; you can hone your art or whatever without too much pressure. You can always squat.” The waitress interrupts us. We're sitting at Badger's, at a table separate from the rest of the band. She asks us if we can all sit together, after, she says, “what happened last time”. Loopy shrugs. “Ja, last time. I am going to have to leave Durban soon, I am slowly but surely getting banned from every place in town.” We're at Badger's in the first place because Loopy has been banned from Amsterdam, across the street, for hitting someone with a chair. “The real reason,” she confides, “is because I tried to tuck into the owner's girlfriend.”
“Fruits and Veggies have ruined my life,” the newest member, violinist Hezron Chetty, tells me. It's something I've heard before from members long since departed. Daryn, their ex-guitarist, told me the same thing just before he left. Rowan (another ex-guitarist) said something similar during their badly orchestrated trip to record at Red Bull Studios in Cape Town, the same trip that ended in drummer Sweet Lu being, as Loopy puts it, “ass-raped” by a member of Cape Town ska band Captain Stu.
When I see Sweet Lu at The Winston he laughs off the incident, wants to talk about other things. “That Hezron kid wanted to join just before I left and I said to him, 'You look like a nice guy, leave while you still have a chance.' He didn't listen. Those okes, they chew people up.” There is not a hint of malice in his voice.
But Lu didn't leave because Loopy or Purity spurred someone to try and stick their dick up his ass while he was passed out. “As a drummer you have to be comfortable with the role you're put in, and that's in the background,” Loopy tells me. “Lu wasn't comfortable with being only the drummer, so he over-compensated and became a bully. The drummer is the most important person in the band. If your drummer is shit, you're fucked… Which is why Justin Grady is so great; he's so tight and doesn't get in anyone's faces.”
“Yeah,” says James, lanky lead guitarist and third-longest-standing member. “Justin plays for the song, not for himself. He's not a flashy drummer, he really gets the job done.” Hezron agrees. “He gets super nervous before he goes on stage. Like he's about to cry, he can't even talk. But when he's up there… man, I've played with a lot of drummers, and he's the best.” A few weeks later at Oppikoppi, I spot Justin sitting on his own and ask him about his role in the band. “No one even knows I'm in the band,” he says, only half joking. “After a gig, people will ask me if I watched the gig because of how good Fruits & Veggies are getting, and I'll have to remind them that I'm the drummer.”
In a small town with so many band-member changes, there's bound to be some simmering resentments about. “Nah,” says Purity. “There is no bad blood, I mean, we made out at Splashy. After the gig, Lu came up to me and he was like, wow! He said he was actually jealous of our drummer Justin, and he really wanted to be back in the band and he started crying. So I tucked into him, like, 'it's gonna be OK pal, we can still be friends, there doesn't need to be any bad vibes'. I still see him randomly at parties, but obviously it will never be the same.”
Purity is telling me this stuff while her six-month-old daughter, Naledi, is gurgling in her lap. Jerome (her partner, boyfriend, or just the guy she's living with right now… she won't say) approaches to ask if he can take care of Naledi for a while so that we can talk in peace. Jerome is a Durban pub scrap stalwart and they've been loosely together for a while now. “When I did realise I was pregnant, I eliminated the list of people and it fell on around the same time I was with Jerome and Gina, so Jerome was definitely the dad – until the birth, which was a great shock.” The shock she's referring to is Naledi's pinkish whiteness. Both Purity and Jerome are distinct shades of brown. “We were all hooking up with each other. But the pregnancy changed all that.”
So where did Naledi come from? “She came from the moon!” Purity laughs roughly. “Nah, she was created on a very odd night. I was at Lu's house, there were a lot of people there, I was absolutely drunk, and I just wanted to go cuddle with that person in that bed, and the next thing there is sexual intercourse and no protection and the next day I don't really remember much, and OK, so last night happened.” Purity moves on, the paternity of her child ain't no thang, “Naledi is the major thing, this whole event has made me want to get my head together, made me realise that the band needs to get serious now, to actually get our shit together.”
The blanket is on a lawn in Kloof, just outside Durban up the hill towards Pietermaritzburg. It's a place of dense tropical jungles, suburban Eighties money, and hippies who have retreated from the city proper. There they inhabit an old Spanish mansion that belongs to “a sweet old lady who had to go to an old-age home”, according to Purity. She checks me checking her. “No man, we aren't pulling a move, we pay some rent and shit.”
Ducks angrily patrol the deep-green swimming pool, a Great Dane puppy flounders around. In the distance you can hear the sounds from the freeway on one side and, on the other, coming from the upper house, the strains of Jim Morrison telling an audience that he thinks astrology is a bunch of bullshit. “The lady who runs the house, well the one guy keeps trying to cut down the trees because the cottage gets no light, and she basically hugged the trees and cried until he put down his axe,” she says. “I love it here, but yeah, the ducks sleeping inside is a bit much.”
When Purity is this chilled she hardly resembles the flap-legged whirlwind of sex and dare on stage. “Either this band works, or I move on. This is what I want, and I can't be flaky about it anymore,” she explains. “People moved through the band, we didn't care. It was all about being punk rock and shit, but now, well… Now I'm stoked about the new energy in the band. We're making new songs, we're tight. We're ready to record, we just haven't found the right producer yet.” She knows she's not being entirely upfront. “To be honest, we haven't been looking that hard,” she admits. “We've never been satisfied with our recordings. I'm always unhappy about my voice. Or maybe I'm just shit in studio. I would assume that the person who can capture us would have to spend a lot of time with us.” And so, the search for extended family continues.
The line-up of the band seems to be solidifying. There is a level of dedication not there in the sloppy, raw early days, a commitment summed up by James: “I was working at Ocean Basket when I got the call to join the band. I quit the job right then and stole a piece of sushi. I didn't even own a guitar but I knew that this is what I wanted.” He shakes his head: “I'd get to the gig and be like, shit, I have to talk to the guitarist from the other band. I'd be like, 'shit dude, can I borrow your lead? Sure, OK, so can I borrow your amp? OK sure', and then, like, 'can I borrow your guitar?'” “Poephol times,” adds Loopy. “It was bad. For a while he didn't have a guitar and I didn't have a bass. I smashed my bass at Splashy, I thought I'd do a big rock star move.” James and Hezron laugh, shaking their heads. “During a five-in-the-afternoon set,” adds James. Loopy just shrugs, “So excited! 'This is it!' I thought we'd hit the big time. It took me a year to get it fixed, to save up the R800. The big time… right. I probably made R150 out of that gig.”
Speaking to the beatific Purity, lying sprawled in the sunshine, it occurs to me that it's this yin and yang, this absolute destruction and the absolute love, that make Fruits & Veggies so vital. And Purity knows it: “I come from a place where I think everything and everyone is in oneness with everyone and everything and that's the way it should be. Loopy comes from a slightly more destructive place.”
It's around 5am and I'm struggling to punch these notes into my phone, partially because I can't see properly and partially because a few moments ago it blew right out of my hand while I was trying to shoot video from the car window of Loopy, teeth askew, as she laments the quality of gay boys and lesbians at tonight's gig. Everyone is too easy, including us in the car, she says. So easy, in fact, that we should just give her more money so she can buy more cocaine so she can stay up, fuck, it doesn't have to be cocaine, she'll take slimming liquid or sangoma-grade ephedrine or whatever, but she has to busk at a craft market in the morning and fuck all of you. We're circling back to the weird after-party at the tiled and tacky Willowvale Hotel, a former live venue that now hosts electronic events, like the failed trance party straight out of my 1996 small-town nightmares. We have to stalk through the front to get back to the hotel room where Jacques [Moolman] from Shadowclub is jumping up and down on a fucked bed while pub scraps look on, bored and disdainful of his rockstar-attention whoring. People are making out in the bathtub and in the corridors, boys and boys, girls and boys and girls, a general messy sexual abandon seeps through the air, the rank smell of freedom. It's this sort of loose-flowing sexuality that's one of the defining points of the band lifestyle. Everyone shares, everyone switches teams, everyone doesn't care, yet cares excruciatingly too much.
I had come to town for Fruits & Veggies but I planned other distractions. I know the cunts and they're loose with time, appointments, etc. However, they were so, let's just say, “keen” to get some press that they decided – no, not they, James and Hezron decided – that I must HANG OUT WITH THEM. It's why, I suspect, this shitty hotel party is happening. A mission I'm grateful for and already regretting, half tweaking on shit drugs as we're escaping from a cheap hotel room where I swear we were thrown out by sex workers who saw how unprofitable we were, and trying to retrieve my phone from a pavement as the sun comes up, warm as fuck in winter, over a flat ocean, the chad fishermen pushing out their boats in ages-worn Mr Price summer clothes. Fruits & Veggies are stronger than me, and as much as I knew them, I was not prepared for the requirement to push it as far as we could, and then pass out on the side of the road (with a view to getting robbed or raped by vagrants?), just so there's a story to tell during sound check at the next gig.
At this hour, there is nothing insightful to say about the music; they're hard, fast, destructively structured, stupidly pop punk, with the kind of lame Gogol Bordello small-town aspirations that are both cringeworthy and awe-inspiring. In short, these fuckers of various birth are the most exciting, and most mystifyingly incapable, saviours that rock'n'roll has going for it right now. They're joyful prophets of systematic abandon, the champions of regretful sex.
This is not to say that they're breaking any sonic boundaries. They remind me of Lou Reed's maxim, “Drums, bass, guitar, vocals is all you'll ever need.” Their simplicity and their heart-wrenching rawness is all they have. They're practically the punk-rock little engine that could.
OK, enough of this misty-eyed bullshit. Loopy's desire to “tuck into” a trance bunny is starting to grate. It's a ridiculous exercise. They're cooning it up for me and I just want more shitty speed, less chance of arrest, and maybe not to vomit. I feel stupid and exploitative because of the way they play up to their “ROLLING STONE feature”, shouting at and cajoling me, calling me The Enemy and trying to remember lines from that awful cliché of a film. But still, their gig earlier at LIVE was nothing less than magnificent and deranged, chaos constructed so seamlessly that the band's untogetherness is suddenly held in doubt.
“I started off listening to hip-hop,” says Loopy. “I was an underground MC – it's how I got the name. We started a rap group. I was Loopy Lucia. Alliteration was huge in the Nineties. Then I got into punk, and then I grew up and I realised genres don't matter. I don't give a fuck what genre a thing is. Which is why we throw the reggae in with the Balkan and the maskandi. We write songs about being stoked, sometimes about being burnt out, about growing up in Durban.”
Purity is less amped. “I don't think the rest of the band knows all the lyrics to all the songs,” she sighs. It would be nice if they did, if someone asks what do you guys sing about, I shouldn't be the only one to be able to answer.” Her despondency about this is justified, because hidden among all the destruction and chaos are some pretty serious thoughts on capitalism and freedom, aiming often for Strummer levels of engagement.
“Toya Delazy tried to join our band. Before her big record deal.” James is talking me through the period a few years ago when they were casting about for new members. “We wanted a keyboardist and Pure brought her along. So, before practice, we went to a liquor store and she was boasting how she had once drunk a whole quart by herself.” Loopy butts in: “It was so awkward. Then we do this thing where we jam together for like 15 minutes to warm up and then we do a bong. And she was like, WHAT, BEFORE A PRACTICE?” James keeps up the banter: “Shame, poor thing, I don't think she even got to play her instrument once. She came to four or five practices but I always used her lead, because I didn't have one. We didn't even give her an amp.”
Loopy again: “I think Toya Delazy is going to top herself.” Then she pauses, “Shit, I shouldn't have said that, we're supporting her in a few weeks, and they're paying well. Please tell me this will come out after that gig.” I check my dates. Loopy continues: “Have you been following her Facebook statuses? She's depressed; it must be that sell-out deal. We have a betting pool going – I have her for December.” “Fuck you Loopy,” says James, “that was my idea.”
And where did Hezron come from? “I asked Hez if he would jam with us at Splashy,” James tells me. “He rehearsed with us, he jammed Splashy, but we still weren't sure. Then, two weeks later, I found out he was on acid for that gig, and I said, he has the job.” So how the fuck does a violinist end up in a ska-punk band? “I grew up being told the violin was a classical instrument and I always wanted to prove them wrong,” Hez explains. “Plus, being an Indian in a ska band who plays the violin, we're quite rare. Yellow Card has a Jamaican violinist but that's about it.” Loopy takes over: “From the beginning, we wanted brass and then we realised that that would put us in the ska-punk corner forever, and we want to constantly expand our music.”
The current line-up is rounded out by Cameron Lofstrand on guitar, lead singer of Black Math. “Actually,” says James, “Black Math wanted me to play keyboard for them, but I didn't own one. So I said to them, if one of you joins our band, I'll join your band. And that's how we got Cameron. I still haven't played for Black Math yet.” Loopy, forever instilling the “Fruits & Veggies ruined my life” mantra takes over. “Cameron was so sweet when he joined the band. Now he's becoming an arsehole. We're so proud.” Out of nowhere, James suddenly leans forward: “Do you think it's too late to change our name?” Hezron takes the gap: “It is a bit of a shit name.”
Loopy switches back to the subject at hand: “That's the thing about changing the line-up. With every member change, Fruits & Veggies have started from scratch, throwing out the old songs and writing new material; they've tossed a lot of good melodies and lyrics to the side of the road. “I keep suggesting that we relook the old songs,” Purity says. “But people are just amped on creating new things. And the music has changed a fuckload. The drumming is tighter. We still stick with the groove, the reggae bits that we will never neglect, and the ska. And with Hezron in the band we're experimenting with more of a gypsy feel as well. James is learning accordion.” I immediately posit that Balkan music is becoming a bit passé.
The people in the band now have all reached the point that we know: this is what I want to do with the rest of my life, so I'm not going to get wasted before a gig. There's plenty of time to do that afterwards, away from the venue. And I'm not going to rock up drunk to a show. It's also an issue of respecting the audience. They came to see a show, not to see you fucking out.”
A few days before at a gig where F&V are supporting Black Math, Similo stumbles into me drunkenly, looking like a thin-toothed hobo. I ask him what he thinks of the new Fruits line-up and songs. “They're shit now,” is all he has to offer before he wanders off into the night.
Purity waves it aside: “We don't look at music that way, whether it's been done before or other people are doing it. When we want to explore something, we explore it. It's always going to be different anyway, because it's us doing it. We're not a full-on gypsy band, we don't have a tuba, we're just dabbling.
“Back then, we were singing about that lifestyle, and the things we didn't like. It was just honesty about the lives that we were living. The new songs have calmed down, they're not in your face, they're not that 'fuck you' straightforward. For 'Taste of Love', me and Loopy had a huge fight. She still was 'let's say “fuck you”, let's say “dick”, let's say “cunt”', and I was like, 'Seriously? We've grown from that.' And I seriously felt like I was the only one who had. And I want more for her and the rest of the band. We're fucking close, me and Loopy. We're pretty fucking tight.”
In one of the Fruits' earlier incarnations, Purity used to drop a bit of Zulu into the mix, a bit of wild punk ululating. Whatever happened to that? “We left those songs behind. I do only the things I'm comfortable with. And that may be a little naive because it's not all about me… ” As if on cue, her baby starts crying. She sticks her finger in the moon mouth. “It's also about reaching other people and making them identify with what you're trying to do. But for me, singing in Zulu doesn't hit the spot. Singing in Zulu with a rock riff behind me just doesn't make sense. The rhythm of the language… how do I explain it… I think a song would absolutely have to be crafted in that language totally. And I wouldn't do it justice. Unless it's created Zulu from the ground up. And I'm not Zulu, I'm Mswati. I lived a Zulu life, my mom is from Swaziland, my dad was Somalian, but I was born in KZN. Yet, I don't even speak Mswati, unless I see my grandmother. But I lived a Zulu life.” Both Purity and Loopy talk about their relationships with their parents and to culture as if it's something in the distant past.
“Yes,” she continues, “it's necessary to stay true to your roots and where you come from, but at the same time you can be inspired by so many things. To be quite honest, we're more influenced by international artists. Who is there to be influenced by locally really – Stimela? Certainly not the BLK JKS, I don't get them. They take themselves way too seriously. And to be quite honest, I saw Spoek live and he was shit.”
Loopy knows her parents don't approve but she tells me they're learning to accept her life choices. When I see her a few weeks later at Oppikoppi, it's changed entirely. “They fucking want me to settle down! They can't accept it, they're trying to cut me off!” she shrieks as they arrive in the dust bowl, 20 hours or so of straight-driving momentum in her voice. James, on the other hand, has no such problem. His father, Michael Cross, manages Fruits & Veggies (as well as Brendan Shields). He follows them around for the duration of Oppikoppi, making sure they stay just on the right side of out of hand, at least until after the gig when Loopy is unleashed into Mordor like some kind of avenging rhinoceros.
Back in Durban, Loopy had told me that her parents are pretty liberal on all fronts. “I mean they're not happy, they'd prefer it if I got a job. But when I first failed school, my mom said, 'I don't know what's disturbing your schoolwork, it couldn't be boys, because you've never been into boys but even if it's girls it shouldn't be affecting your marks.'
“And my mom knows that I smoke pot, and she's not happy – what parent would be? But I've tried to explain to her that the reason weed is illegal is because of the racist propaganda of the Thirties. You know the whole Hearst thing, negroes tempting white women with marijuana, which is what I'm doing, carrying on the tradition.” This is typical Loopy, breaking a serious thought with a joke, and then diverting. More agit-punk propaganda from the self-titled “racist bassist”? “No man, we don't see each other as, like, there is White James, we like to take the piss out of people who think like that, you know, blacking out at the cafeteria and all that. I was raised in a multiracial environment.”
Purity has deeper thoughts on all of this. “I only see colour when I'm around black people,” she says. “Day to day, partying, I surround myself with people that I want to and those people I love, who love me back. But as soon as I get out of that realm and I take a taxi at the market, that's when I realise that black people are so ignorant. I mean, I should be able to relate more with a black person than a white person but it's the complete opposite. I want to be able to feel more open with black people than with white people. It's harder for me to make black friends than with any other race. Growing up, all my friends were black. Then I chose to live this different life, this completely different life, and it switched.”
“I lost my phone,” Loopy shrugs while flirting with a skinny mall goth waitress. “I was shagging in public and it fell out my pocket.” Stylist-photographer Tessa-Mae Hadlow, another vital part of the entourage, exclaims, “Fuck you, Loopy! She's the worst lesbian. She fucked a pilot.”
Loopy explains: “I met him at Flagons and he said, 'You want to get a bag?' so I shagged him at The Cube [a notorious make-out spot]. Pulled some muscles.” Tessa holds Loopy's hand in an attached sort of way. “Fuck you Tessa!” says Loopy, pushing it away. “You've got a boyfriend now.” As much as anything else, this loose sexual affection is part of the F&V lifestyle. “I hate women,” Loopy tells me days later. “I'm a misogynist lesbian.” Her reasoning for the sexual escapades? “All our friends are bi, it's pretty much, 'you take what you can get'... we're all desperate.” But she takes a moment to think. When Loopy is sober you begin to realise that she's no fool. “Nah, I think people put too much pressure on putting themselves into boxes. I prefer women because they're gorgeous and they smell nice and they've always been sweet to me. When it comes to being with someone there is a difference between our sex drive and our pair-bond drive. There is a difference between fucking and wanting to be in a relationship.”
For Purity, the sex-drive-boundary-pushing is more of an evolutionary impetus, a moral imperative. “I think kids are exploring things on so many levels, and sexuality is one of them,” she says. “If I was to be introduced to a different group of people, I'd start seeing things differently, I'd start receiving things differently, I'd start questioning everything about what I think I believe. And when you explore things, everything is put in question, and sexuality is one of them. I think now is a time when young people are starting to question things that their parents never experienced, things beyond the human scope.”
There is competition of course. “There's no shame with Pure,” says Loopy. “I'll tell her I really like a girl and she'll just tuck into her.”
On stage, Purity is a punk-rock Brenda Fassie, a ska Skin, a surf-rock Against Me!, a real do-not-give-a-fuck-falling-over funster. But she's held up by Loopy. The honest truth is that as much as the line-up has changed over the years, Loopy and Purity are the core of the band, the songwriters, the push and the pull, the all-loving and the all-destroying; the Kali of ska. And as much as they pretend to not give a fuck, both of them are filled with a righteous anger at all kinds of systems. It's no wonder they're still stuck in Durban; it's no wonder no festivals feel comfortable booking them. They crave headline slots and then they shit on the organisers or backstage couches. “Yeah,” says Purity. “There are different versions. Loopy was drunk and lost, and she claims she only pissed on it, but witnesses say – and that's including the guy who was about to go on stage – that she pooped on the backstage couch at Splashy.”
Splashy banned the group and then two years later, after some favours and begging, allowed them to come back. After the festival, Loopy returned the favour. “Splashy put out this thing saying 300 days until the next Splashy Fen,” she tells me. “And then me and James were a bit tipsy and we commented, saying 300 days until Durban musicians get ripped off again. And Pedro Carlo got upset. But here is the thing: we aren't the first ones to say it. When you're paying bands R1 000 to jam at your festival in 2012, and it doesn't even cover the petrol, then well… As a KZN festival, it's just shit that the Durban bands are treated like second-class citizens.”
Loopy is well into her tirade now. “The worst thing about being in this industry is that you're doing what you love, and the organisers are business people, they're not artists, and they exploit that. Musicians, let's face it, get pretty shafted most of the time. We don't want to play there anymore. What are they going to give us – exposure? Fuck that…”
Is Loopy an anarchist? “A lot of people give faith and power to people who exploit them. I believe in a socialist democracy as a way toward proper anarchy, because education needs to happen, people need to work, the economy is in a shambles, etcetera,” she says. “Trying to create an anarchist state now would just lead to, well, anarchy. And actually, I am a terrible anarchist. I'm an anarchist that eats McDonalds. I believe that the people should govern themselves. I trust you more than I trust…” she stops. “Nah, I don't trust you.”
Purity is again beatific about her politics: “I don't have all the answers, only suggestions really… I will carry on writing about the way I see things, and the way I want other people to see things, that people shouldn't rely on the things that they are told, or their handed-down assumptions about what is right; people should question more, there is always more to the story.”
There's a desperation to Loopy's I-don't-give-a-fuckness, a dare to go further that is flipside to Purity's free-love-overthrow-the-system-with-positive-vibes attitude. This is the balance and the entropy of their performance. Purity is electric sex, high-kicks and humility, Loopy is the stand-up comedian who treats everyone as her bitch. Yet the combination of the lyrics they both write, grounded with Loopy's groove, is their joy.
The first glimpse I get of them at Oppi is backstage, where they're struggling with the set list. Their manager tells them to just write the order of the songs. “We haven't even named half the songs,” says James. A day later, they burst on stage in the afternoon sun, glorious with manic feral energy. It doesn't take them long to have the crowd off the grass and skanking furiously. Purity announces: “Man, when the sun goes down tonight, things are going to get messy!” She then extends an open invitation to anyone who wants to camp with them, before launching into “Without A Gwaai or a Cent”, a celebration of, yes, being broke and without cigarettes. The crowd eats up Purity's open-leg-flapping dance and James' grasshopper flings. Loopy is smiling like a Moomin on crack, lapping up the waves of energy they're swapping with the crowd. It's a good moment for Fruits & Veggies and they ride it hard into the ground.
Much, much later, or the following night, I find Loopy up at Klein Bar where she's berating a relatively sober and well-coiffed random for being mediocre. What he's done to deserve this is lost in the fog. “I don't mean to be this way,” she tells me almost forlornly. And then she's distracted by Hennie from aKING who is trying to steal a security golf cart. She rushes off to help him. It's fruitless – they have no keys. She returns and tries to bum a smoke. “Let's face it, I am the story,” she says. She gets that hooded look. “I'm the clown. I'm the entertainment.” It's only momentary, this self-reflection. “Do you think Zahara will ever party with us?” she asks. I can only offer her a shrug and ask where the rest of her band is.
“Pure is hooking up with the guys from Circus Maximus,” she says. It might be a lie, it might be an exaggeration, but this is what endears us to Loopy, and to Fruits & Veggies: they're making up their own story as they go along, constantly reinventing themselves and then trying to live up to the reinvention
The Death of Nostalgia: From Warhol to Witch House
from archive roger graeme young
Gone are the 15 megabytes — fame is now 15 identity cloaks of invisibility. Data-bending IRC pop savants Nikhil Singh and cCOO 2aB9nB (along with WITCHBOY and his URL coven) untangle the unicode of the future of music dissemination, internet-assisted astral travel and their collaboration, Siamese Inside. By the time you read this, everything would have already evolved.
By ROGER YOUNG
“Creativity is not a competitive sport,” is a comment Nikhil Singh has made to me in an earlier conversation. And it's the first thing I want to discuss when I meet him in the Company's Garden for an on-the-record interview about his relationship with other musicians and, given his prolific output over the last few years, the industry of creativity in general.
He's already sitting down at the Gardens Tea Room near the aviary, but looks perpetually like he's swooped in from somewhere, his clothes wrapped around him in a manner that suggests he could take flight at any moment; dark rings under his eyes that speak of late nights remind me tangentially that I must ask him about his veganism.
He points skyward. “Eagles,” he says. And sure enough, above us in the tree is a Bateleur eagle. The first thing to determine is: am I interviewing Nikhil Singh the illustrator of graphic novels, author of stream-of-consciousness fiction and one third of The Wild Eyes, or WITCHBOY, the internet creature that has been cranking out crazy proto/post-witch house albums of late. We're interrupted before I can ask. A giant eagle shit lands square in the middle of the table. Singh stutters a giggly smile. “It's good luck,” he says. “The Romans used to predict the future with eagle shit.”
Bunny Intonamorous (IRL Daniel Kay-Traynor, who records under ≥) is now talking to me over the wires: “The witch house scene emerged around 2009 with the rise of artists like SALEM, White Ring, oOoOO, and †‡†, fusing elements of Southern chopped-and-screwed trap/hip-hop, shoegaze, house music, dark ambient and neo-folk music.” Kay-Traynor is one half of the quintessential label Aural Sects currently releasing WITCHBOY on vinyl and other forms, as well as Coco Incarnadine, or cCOO 2aB9nB, whose debut album WITCHBOY has just produced. Singh maintains that the function of these kinds of labels is deeper than just releasing music, that they're “the spinal structure of this entire thing – without this constant release of media you wouldn't have this, there wouldn't be anywhere for people to communicate.” Bunny explains “this entire thing”: “The ubiquity of quick-sharing via YouTube and MySpace, and later Bandcamp and SoundCloud, was pretty instrumental in starting up any sort of scene – it's one of the first truly 'internet' genres. After the originators propagated more widely, little pockets began to emerge in isolation across the globe and create mini-scenes IRL. One of the other early originators of the form was Story of Isaac, now known as CRIM3S.” That's CRIM3S, not GRIMES; yes, there really is an alternative universe operating right next to yours.
Carl Clandestine, of seminal niche label Clandestine Records (an early platform for Kreayshawn), identifies the progenitors of the scene as Mater Suspiria Vision, Modern Witch, FOSTERCARE, Nattymari, N, ijĒŞǙŞ ҚĦŖİŞŢ and †‡†, before saying: “They all of course sound different.” Later on Carl will say: “ijĒŞǙŞ ҚĦŖİŞŢ was a big influence on a lot of artists. He sadly passed away from AIDS in 2011, and looking back, this instigated a massive change to the 'scene'.” ijĒŞǙŞ ҚĦŖİŞŢ is the Antonio of “Rave Requiem For Antonio”, a track on WITCHBOY'S Apocalipstick. Around the time of his death, the subgenres started to appear; drag (the more Screw-inspired artists), witch house (the noisier artists) and seapunk. Says Singh: “He was quite amazing in a lot of ways. He was a pioneer of this witch house thing. He was churning out 10 tracks a week and videos, just everything. He was very into the clipping thing, but he turned clipping into kind of like an art form. He'd do these crazy things; everything was clipped but it worked, that was the whole aesthetic behind it and he died kind of like in the middle of the whole thing, so without this clipping figurehead things just sort of took different directions, everything sort of changed around then.”
WITCHBOY has a slightly different take: “Clipping became a big thing because people didn't like clipping in their music, so they just start clipping everything and it sounded kinda cool, it was fucking with people's speakers and it sounds great on a dance floor.”
Curt Crackerach continues: “There have been artists in the past that have manipulated these glitches but they never really embraced them… They would use them to compose and create a very hi-fi sound. The difference with the sounds of WITCHBOY and myself is that we tend to not have a problem with music that may be a little abrasive to a pedestrian ear. This is not uncommon in, say, a harsh noise or Beakcore community, but to infuse that sort of cacophony upon music that in essence is still very beat-oriented and pop-structured is sort of a new direction for artistic expression via sound. I am sure neither of us is inventing the wheel here, and there are artists from the '60s who did a similar thing. Neither of us take ourselves so seriously as to think we are breaking any new ground. It takes away from the creative spirit to think that highly of yourself.”
“You have the post-religion people, who sort of jumped on the juke and trap influences, labels still plugging away like Phantasma Disques, who sort of kept to a more droney gothic style of sound,” Curt Crackerach tells me. Curt is also known IRL as Dafydd MacKaharay (this is the first real name I encounter that's harder to pronounce than the symbols-based anons). “There are a whole lot of people who really were drawn to the aesthetics of '90s subculture and cheesy rave and dayglo elements,” he continues. “That stuff seems to garner the most attention because it's loud and bright and gaudy. I think to many it's just playing with symbols and memes. What that does on a subatomic level is a different thing entirely. The fact that everyone seems enthralled with symbols and archetypes has created an age where there are no philosophers. So therefore no philosophy. Perhaps this truly is the blank generation after all.”
Joe Royster (who records as spf5Ø), the other half of Aural Sects, talks about the end of witch house in this light. “I always personally enjoyed the Dadaistic kind of recontextualisation of symbols and ideas more than any actual witchcraft. Apply that same logic to seapunk basically, the fun minus the seriousness, and I can appreciate it, but I fear some are a little too deep into their tropical holiday and have lost sight of that, much like many witch house artists who take the joke a little too serious for my taste.”
There is a proliferation of anons – people running labels have other identities as musicians, as writers, with real-world personas that have no bearing on who they are when communicating in music. Nikhil Singh has never met IRL all these people with whom WITCHBOY has close creative ties. The idea of what a label is has changed so radically that it brings to mind Brian Eno's statement in an interview in 2009: “I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time… It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.”
The witch house thing is this something else. It's a genre, a scene that is not defined by sonic signifiers; its basis is in anonymous collaboration and the rejection of genres. It dances on the carcass of the idea of record labels: a scene that glories in being ungooglable, that communicates not in English or French or legalese, but in the pure sounds of Ableton loops, lo-fied vocals, clipped ranges, ironic symbols and the aesthetic of broken GIFs and scratched DVDs. It's a genre that feeds off the collapse of cultural control, seeks out the wireframe below the surface, and then spits it out into the feed, always conscious of the feed, of staying current in the feed.
Whether in person or by various digital means, Singh/WITCHBOY communicates in large, tightly-woven blocks of information. Facebook missives are like slabs of future Proust. He lends me a copy of his novel; it's a dense and vast, rambling text that I struggle to penetrate. Extracting meaning from word-count and the high ratio of ever-so-slight contradictions is daunting. A request for a small fact leaves me reeling with esoteric outpourings sometimes tempered with a patronising and accusatory tone and punctuated with textual sighs, like “that doesn't matter”. It's clear that Singh operates on a different frequency. The medium is the message and the medium is on overload. Primarily, what Singh wants to talk about now is the album he's just produced for cCOO 2aB9nB, or Carmen Carbomb, SIAMESE INSIDE, soon to be released digitally and on vinyl through Black Bvs, the label through which CRIM3S launched.
Extracted from a stream-of-consciousness Facebook message, Carbomb (who was using the same microKORG that Singh was using in The Wild Eyes) says: “Both of us grew up playing piano and so we have always had a strong musical connection, so we would swap notes online on filter tweaking.” Previously a synth player in Neurotic Mass Movement (NMM), Carbomb also brought a performance-art element into most shows, doing crazy BUTOH-esque dance stuff with vocalist Yin – involving ribbons, mirrors, red plastic sheeting and transparent raincoats, but when NMM was booked for a European tour and set to record in Berlin she was beset by visa troubles. “The only recourse,” she tells me, “was to make a clean break.” Carbomb went on to work on an impressive list of collaborations that includes fauxmusica, Oliver Ho and Cosmotropia de Xam from Mater Suspiria Vision, with whom she made a psychedelic movie called Inside the Clock of the White Rabbit, filmed mostly in Hampstead Heath and later released as a DVD on his label Phantasma Disques. At that time, witch house was taking off in London, mostly around the success of bands like †‡† and CRIM3S. “There was a feeling of camaraderie with all the bands involved,” says Carbomb. “The scene was full of friendly freaks, was like we were all in the same haunted house together, making the same creepy sounds. Even though some were far away, the online connection made it seem like we were all operating together.”
At the same time, WITCHBOY was feverishly releasing a stream of albums, such as HOLLYMODE, APOCALIPSTICK and NARCOTIA, which obsessed on Hollywood-style broken glamour that channelled the scene's sonic aesthetics into an epileptic disposability. (Says Bunny: “They reference forthcoming eschaton events through humanity's interaction with technology and the environment, usually by co-opting B-movie references and post-apocalyptic pop formats like those laid down by Bowie in 'Diamond Dogs'.”)
In 2012, Carbomb and Singh converged on a house in Ramsgate along the South Coast of KZN. “The songs that emerged there had a science-fiction quality to them and a sort of tropical flavour,” says Carbomb. “We were watching a lot of old movies like American Gigolo and Wild Orchid and there was this whole feeling of '80s synth soundtracks to the thing; a kind of faded pastel neon feeling that got into the music. There's a feeling of robotic versus primal, future sexuality, telepathic role reversal. Also, the contrast of First World/Third World and the interface between and via the Net as some sort of weird futuristic mind-bar.” How did this convergence of themes come about? “We don't ever discuss themes, we just go with what feels right and what is inspiring in the moment. After a few songs it seemed like it was heading in a certain direction and we just followed that like a homing beacon through a sea of alien jungle.” Long on description of the album, Carbomb is short on caring about where it goes next: “Oh, I don't really think about people listening to it. Though it's always nice when people tell me they enjoy it. I guess I don't feel much about it really.”
Author's note: The Singh / WITCHBOY simulacrum communicates in large chunks of information. It's a standard device of long-format feature interview writing to interject pauses into the text, in the form of “Singh leans forward”, or “WITCHBOY thinks for a second”, or some such thing to try approximate the rhythm of the subject's speech. Singh/Witchboy never pauses, he never breathes, he never stops. So I'm going to dispense with that device and just present to you the chunks.
WITCHBOY expands on the production and composition of SIAMESE INSIDE: “I had been working on Le Universe Perverse and Apocalipstick before, which was quite hooked into genres on the internet like post-rave. With Carmen's I wanted to do something different, like actually make the songs as if they were live.”
He continues: “I wanted to put things down as if they were … you'd listen to them and they had a prog-rock sensibility. Instruments would interact with each other. It didn't have that artificiality, but the texture of the sounds were hooked into what was happening at the time. I wanted an R'n'B tropical bossanova vibe but it's not like seapunk, which was quite hardcore and intense with dolphin shit. You have all these kids in the north going on about tropical stuff, but I'm obsessed with tropical stuff because I'm in the tropics, it's in my blood.
“We thought it could start the album down here, get the sea into it. So the first three songs we got the energy right and we sat down basic structures that had that kind of late-'80s vibe, but in a tropical context to capture this and we set a template for the rest of the album. It took the rest of the year to do. With Apocalipstick, I was churning out a song a week, but with this I wanted to refine stuff. So I need it to have a sonic range in the production, where I want it to have more a kind of live feeling where instruments, although they might be electronic, are all played live. There's very little sequencing. It has more of a prog-rock sensibility, but put in an electronic aesthetic. I would ideally like dumping stuff to tape but that's such a bitch.”
When I'm interviewing him IRL, I make the mistake of saying that his music “is created with software”. He quickly corrects me. “No, I'm playing them. I tapped out most of the drums, it's all live. It's the same as a keyboard, it just looks different. This is what people like the purists will never understand. It doesn't matter what it looks like, it matters how live it is, so you press this button that makes a sound, you're playing an instrument, it doesn't matter if it's on your keyboard, 'Robot in a Red Dress' is all live guitar and keyboard shortcuts. Len [former Wild Eyes bandmate] lent me his midi keyboard for a while, but I actually ended up not using it that much. I used it for some live parts where I wanted to use both hands because you don't have an octave range on a keyboard, but even that became unnecessary because I was layering stuff in an orchestral way. I better say this because this is actually quite important: if you listened to any music that I've done over the last however many years, the big thing for me is arrangement. I'm obsessed with arrangement and when I arrange things I don't care about sound quality, because those things aren't that important to me. I grew up listening to blues and stuff like that. Crappy wax cylinder recordings. I like that, it's got a texture. Like if you listen to Robert Johnson it's not Dolby stereo spread but you can dance to it.”
WITCHBOY has also just released Hampstead Tapes (his “Width of a Circle”), a collection of folk recordings that sound like they were made under a blanket with a tin can and string, of him doing acoustic versions of his material, and some covers, most notably “Katie Cruel”, a traditional song that's been covered by Karen Dalton, White Magic and quite a few others. WITCHBOY's “Katie Cruel” feels like it's been made by time machine with the ghost of Dalton by his side. It's no surprise that WITCHBOY is fully in support of the outsider, being so determinedly one himself. Hampstead Tapes, recorded in 2009, was inspired by the YouTube Folk explosion of 2009, including “this granny, granny Jens, this woman, obviously she'd grown up learning Appalachian folk, sitting in her kitchen in front of her dishwasher, just recording folk music, just really good stuff. And there were others, tons of them, hundreds of them; it was a folk explosion. It was very much in that spirit of this ham-radio communication across the aeons because if the spirit is correct it doesn't matter on what you recorded.”
So does he simply not collaborate with people IRL anymore? “It depends on who the person is, because you could click with someone and you might not even have to talk that much and you're working really well. Then again, you could meet someone in real life and not have a fucking clue what they're talking about, ever – which I've had a lot in Cape Town. But look, I made an effort to collaborate with people here. I wasn't sitting in my ivory tower saying I'm not going to be involved. I tried to be involved. I listened to everyone's stuff. I didn't turn away people and I found it all lacking, severely lacking.”
So why is he based in Cape Town? “I'm based in Venus. I'm not in Cape Town. How often do you see me in Cape Town?” But his physical form manifests in Cape Town more than anywhere else? “But it doesn't.” OK, um, how does the energy of Cape Town affect how you interact with the rest of the world? “The energy of Cape Town is very specific, it's quite a churning out of energy. So with me I've always found that, and it's the same with everyone, it's quite like a dry, intense churning out of energy. Either you ride it or it burns you out. That's why you're either constantly doing stuff or you're freaking out. It's the nature of Cape Town, it's like we're sitting on a generator. So I'm quite good at harnessing energy here and working with it, but it's gotta be quite direct energy. For example, I find it really difficult writing in Cape Town because with writing I need to zone into a sort of underwater vegetative realm where I can work slowly and think. I can make music and art here because it's direct, it's quite action-packed, but things for me that are slower are quite difficult. I need to go out of town to work on those things. It's good but it can also be bad.”
So there isn't really a witch house scene in South Africa? “There are barely enough who are in tune in the places where it is actually happening. What we're witnessing now is pretty much fallout, and the thing with Cape Town is it's not really the fault of people. We really are cut off and there's so many stupid distractions like forced protocols about creativity that it actually protracts people learning things themselves. So I don't really care; there's never really been a scene in Cape Town with anything. It's always been this too-late, two-years-down-the-line thing.”
To be fair to WITCHBOY, he did tell me he didn't want to talk about Cape Town or about South Africa in any context, but his mind is taken by the flow. “I think people talk too much here, there's also a lot of mindless hedonism, because the thing is the creativity should be part of the hedonism. That's when you get a scene, is when the hedonism is linked to the creativity, but here the hedonism is not linked to the creativity. You have this idea of a party town and people feel this need to integrate it and they watch films and they're like, 'OK I have to wear this, I have to get trashed and then I'm gonna have fun,' and it doesn't really have anything to do with the place. One of the things that fascinates me about South Africa in terms of culture is that every major culture in the world has survived by integrating with cultures around it. We're surrounded by fascinating cultures. You know, you talk to Credo Mutwa, there are all these people, there's stuff going on in the land, there's interesting music but none of it comes into the mainstream Westernised culture; it doesn't. And that's the failing; it cannot integrate, and without integration there is nothing there, just bubbles filled with the same old crap.”
Here is WITCHBOY'S only real pause. Then he continues the charge: “You've gotta understand some things about me first, right. I didn't finish high school; I didn't go to any universities. I spent a lot of time living in temples and Buddhist retreats and all of this shit because I was trying to get away from stuff. I don't think that humans are the only audience. I don't think that we're very important at all actually. There's more to it than that. It's not like you're making music for aliens to dance to or whatever, but the fact is, humans are really low on the spectrum. When you're creating something, you're speaking in an ancient language to other things and for other things. You're actually moving away from humanity – it's irrelevant, it's completely irrelevant. It's nice because sooner or later you're gonna have to wake up and walk to the shop and it can be a strange feeling if you're a stranger in a strange land. Sometimes it's comforting – you don't have to explain yourself – sometimes it gets a bit lonely, but it doesn't really have anything to do with what you're doing at four in the morning on astral level X.”
During one of our online exchanges I threw a series of phrases at Singh. Here are some of the results:
Vocal Manipulation
In terms of processes and FX etc, I generally think less focus should be attributed to the means and more to the effect of the final product. This particular effect, however, can be used to remove a certain stigma that accompanies the “idea” of what a vocal in a song should be. People generally expect certain things of vocals in songs, particularly pop songs. Vox modulation, when used correctly (less of a texture and more of an enhancer) can accentuate the subversive – in this way vocal manipulation is an acting-aid ha ha, a sort of cartoonified Stanislavsky cloak of invisibility to assist in channelling the sentiments of submerged personalities.
Myth Building
I mean, it's more about musical mind-melding across distance than relying on insubstantial Ozymandias configurations. Less substance, more myth-making required to fill in the gaps. There's a certain practicality to creating art – what is made to gather and cling to it afterward is divorced from the actual processes.
Earl of Rochester
The thing is that so-called “extreme behaviour” within the confines of a social structure is only really extreme by the standards of that court. The behaviour of the libertines was only really seen as extreme in relation to the conservatism of that court. I view pandering one's charms to a court as a form of cowardice. I have always respected the ones who left more – to found their own kingdoms of the imagination. That and the vision-stricken conquerors who laid waste to pre-existing structures on the vague authority of dreams.
“Your mistake is thinking that there's one thing.” Back at the tea room, Singh is getting more and more frustrated with my attempts to understand the post-witch house landscape. “It's like the '90s, there was a music explosion. You gotta look at it as an anthropological phenomenon; it's just like something that happened. I mean they were having alphabetical drug parties, OK; literally, they were all psychedelics, which is to their credit. People are into psychedelics like A for acid, B for whatever, but they'd go through this whole list. I don't think you need bass, it's like irrelevant really and they were asking me for shit to DJ – they didn't even have a beat, it was just like sounds. So we're not talking about parties where people go and get funky. They go and go to other planets and whatever. The whole idea is similar to the whole beatnik thing, right. You had a bunch of weirdos fucking around in their rooms, taking drugs, coming up with stuff. Then you had all these hipster kids who were like, 'Wait a minute, you're doing this, now I'm gonna put on a beret, now I'm doing what you're doing.' So the difference between the hipster kids and the people who originated all of this is that the people who originated it were just trying to do something to get out of their headspace. They were just trying to push boundaries for themselves and it triggered stuff. The hipster kids are just latching onto whatever's there. It's empty. We're gonna go into a bland time but I think the thing is it's out there now. I suppose that you can make your own music and operate outside this so-called music fascism that exists, which has existed for years.”
So the music is defined by a convergence of factors? “No, the convergence is defined by the music, because people are not making music to show each other, they're communicating via the music. So if you wanna communicate with someone out there, you don't, like talk to them, you make them a song. It all started with MySpace where you had to create your own pages, so you had a lot of people talking to each other in images. I had a lot of friends who didn't speak English, but we talked to each other in huge, long visual comments. What it is is this moving away from linear conversation and talking in art, creatively, not out of any decorative need. Like, if you're in a drug trance and you're making something you can't really, necessarily tell someone what you're doing; you have to show them. It's leading back to primitive forms of communication that are more sophisticated; contemporary forms of communication are poisoned by social protocol. When you're communicating creatively, no matter what medium you're using – mathematics or music, art, whatever – you're communicating directly.”
And you're not passing on the secrets of the world either, you're just communicating? “Some of them think they are. You've got a lot of these weirdos who are deep into some kind of philosophy that's usually drug-fuelled.”
But surely pre-language-based communication is largely person to person, except for, like, cave drawings or pyramids? “In fact a lot of the ancient things were done astral body-to-astral body. The physical was completely separated. People communicated over thousands of miles by astral projecting to the people. In fact, it's kind of weird because it is being done again; it's gotten back to that, but in a technologically-aided kind of way. This is the whole point, you see. You can't quantify things intellectually because the mind is a disability, it's a hindrance.
“And the internet isn't necessary; nothing's really necessary, but you see, the internet wasn't planned. It's the same as a lot of technological advances: they came about of their own accord to sort of physicalise a need that was already there. We're returning to a not-quite-a-hive mentality, because it's not homogenised, but a way of communicating with each other to a specialised degree. The internet is the death of nostalgia.”
Three observations from Singh:
Ten years ago, let's say you had a friend in Paris, you'd be like, 'I wonder how so and so is, it's been ages since we've seen them.' Now you know what they're wearing, you can picture them. The thing is it's boosted our psychic abilities, not to a degree that it's become this phenomenon, but we have.
A year-and-a-half ago, I went on this mad beatnik expedition to Europe. I started in Sweden. I made it all the way down to Sorrento [Italy], I camped fucking in Milan. I went through the whole of Germany twice, up and down, Denmark. And I only feel like I'm in Europe more now. But when I was there I could have really been anywhere. But the fact is the idea of being somewhere physically doesn't even exist anymore. Look at tourists – they're not really there; they're in a little bubble.
In London, I was doing party reviews and after a while I got tired of this and just thought I'm just gonna write about what it's like anyway and I started getting these emails from people going, “Wow, you captured exactly what the party was like,” but I hadn't even been to the event but I was there, I just didn't need to be there. People have been going on about the last five years about consciousness expansion. This is what it is, the nuts and bolts of it. Our consciousness is expanding and we're using it to spread our awareness into places we wouldn't be able to go. It's like remote viewing on a very basic level.
For all the projects behind him – the Salem Brownstone graphic novel, the two incarnations of The Wild Eyes – Singh is incredibly future-focused. “You make something in your laboratory and you throw it away but still, it's in your life and you have an awareness of all the things you've done.” And there is the question of the unpublished novel, Taty Went West, a voluminous noirish sci-fi parade of misfits that channels Burroughs and Mae West.
“Writing is the thing I've done the most of,” Singh tells me, “but I put the least out because for me it's quite a poisoned world, the publishing world.” He won't be pressed on details; instead, he switches to: “All the apparatus for writing is internal. With all the other things there's always a bit of externalising, learning an instrument, learning how to use stuff, but with writing it's ordering your internal things to create things. So for me it's always been the purest, which is another reason I don't want it really to get out because it will get destroyed.”
For someone who churns out micro-pop paeans by the dozen, it's almost an about-face. “I've wanted to master certain narrative forms first. When I got to that stage I was happy, but then finding the right conduit for it – because my experience of the publishing world, it's not at all how it used to be with the writers that I like, so I'm not really comfortable trying to chop something up to feed into that machine so I don't really know yet.
“The thing is I have one thing in my favour, creatively, is I'm able to let stuff go. I know a lot of people who can't let stuff go but I know when I reached my point where I wanna move on.” He draws his coat around him and sort of slides down into his chair. “This constant refinement, it's like things are always gonna be flawed; there'll always be flaws. It's not important; what's important is that you've expressed it to a degree that you can express it and you're capable of expressing more. You've gotta keep moving.
“We used to have this in the pre-Victorian era because there was less distraction so you had people constantly refining stuff because they had nothing better to do, like a week in Geneva at some house, like, working on a poem. Everyone could play a musical instrument, and we've just forgotten about it 'cos there's just so much distraction.” He fixes me with a penetrating stare, an imploring “don't you get it?” look.
“This is one of the things I learnt from all those temples and things, is learning how to take certain distractions out of your life. It's not religious at all; it's just a question of streamlining your yacht. So you change your diet, you change this, all just so you have more time to do what you wanna do, more energy. Because that's really what I wanna do, just keep doing stuff, that's what I like.”
Rolling Stone South Africa — May 2013
Dark Days Exit
from archive roger graeme young
In his cut-up and complex world, electronica savant Felix Laband's burdens are also his freedoms: television advertising, drugs, a trail of fragmented relationships, and the ambient kwaito protest album that refuses to complete itself.
Words by ROGER YOUNG
Photograph by Justin McGee
“Everyone is all, like, just let it go, let it go, let it go. It can't just be let go.” Felix Laband is chain-smoking and laying out notebooks on the parquet floor of his one-bedroom Jo'burg flat that's mostly studio space. Spliced images from Seventies National Geographics and Nineties porn magazines are scrawled over, teeth blacked out, words written around bodies, encasing the Breitz-like figures in some kind of Burroughs cut-up nightmare spiral. Stacks of vinyls, magazines, CDs and books — predominantly first-person accounts of African wars, genocides, atrocities — spill off the windowsills. I'm here to listen to his new album Deaf Safari. It's been nearly finished for about three years. Laband has been up for days working on a song, tweaking but being unable to complete it. The windows are blacked out with blankets for soundproofing. Coffee cups and ashtrays litter the space. He looks up from the floor. “What all those fuckers don't understand is that I know the feeling, and I know I'll be able to recognise it when it's done. It's not something that eludes you once it's there.”
It's nearly seven years since Laband's Dark Days Exit carved a hole in South African electronica, and the path from there to here is littered with all kinds of disappointment, no-shows, sightings and conjecture — Laband's disastrous Fiction night, Laband at some after-party in 2008, Laband late for another gig, Laband and the unfinishable album, Laband asleep at the wheel of his incredible talent.
Recently, a different kind of conjecture has been bubbling to the surface. DJ Snakehips (Laband's DJ alter ego) started popping up in mid-2011, playing a mix of his own tracks from previous albums, odd electronica and kwaito just out of date. Professor's “Jezebel” seemed to be his favourite. Occasionally, in the middle of all of this, a new Felix Laband tune. After a few months, DJ Snakehips gave way to Laband playing as Laband and trying out new material. The album that would never be finished had poked its head out of the ground. At the Cape Town Electronic Music Festival earlier this year, Laband said that Deaf Safari would be out before the end of the year. Everyone connected to the business end of South African electronica shook their heads like weary veterans of some undocumented war. “He's been promising it for ages,” they said. So-and-so has heard it and it's finished, so-and-so has heard that it's no good, so-and-so says Laband has given up on it.
“I used to have a KISS cover band.” Laband is going through a box of old photographs, dug out from under a record crate of electronic detritus. He shows me a picture of three boys in their early teens clutching cardboard guitars. “I was pulled into the headmaster's office and accused of being a Satanist. I had to publicly burn all my KISS records. The other kids' moms wouldn't let me play with them any more.” He shrugs it off: “So I got into skateboarding.”
Getting Laband just to play the new material for me is proving to be more difficult than I imagined. It's not that he doesn't want to, but he's an ADD magpie and there is always something else to be enthusiastic about. None of the chaos in here is detritus to him.
Day Four in Johannesburg for the interview. Laband has already postponed more than a few times, because he was either finishing a commercial or a new track or having his car fixed or just needed to sleep. But now he is finally about to play me something. And then his keyboard fucks out.
“How much is a new keyboard?” he asks me, banging it against his desk. Then the doorbell rings. It's someone he works with, or for, making music for commercials. They want him to come to a brief tomorrow for a new job. He says he'll have to play the album for me another time.
I ask him about working in advertising, how it affects his music. “Commercial work has funded my entire new studio.” He indicates the trestle table covered in desks, pads, battered PCs, guitars, and turntables with a certain weariness. “But it affects me more than you can imagine. It's why I fucked out so much, because I hate it. They'll hire me to do an advert where they will literally get me to copy, note for note, some piece of shit music.” His frustration rises and he begins to pace. “They won't give me the opportunity to try my own thing. And I wonder, why are you hiring me? Because it's their opportunity to stick their cock in my face.
“And then — I get this a lot — you hear people saying, 'It's so sad seeing Felix like that, I feel so bad.' Well, whatever, bru! It's sad seeing you. You're the guy who's still doing adverts and paying off your big car. All those dreams you had, all those films you were going to make. All gone.”
He pauses for a second — you can see him searching in his head — and then he breaks into that gap-toothed grin. “You must promise me that you put that in,” he says with a wink in his voice, a child anticipating a future scolding.
But Laband is not paying off a big car. Laband is trying to finish his long-overdue ambient kwaito protest album. Laband is dealing with a chronic drug addiction. Compost, his German record company, is nervous. He's touring Germany soon. He needs to stay clean. The evidence that he's trying is there. A pamphlet on Suboxone, a buprenorphine (the methadone replacement that Kurt Cobain was rumoured to be on when he killed himself), is on his work desk. Throughout the days I'm with him, on and off, we constantly return to the subject of “getting clean”. The drug does work for some, but it's a long road out, fraught with relapse and personal disappointment. It might be the only way out that works for Laband, though: he's fiercely against rehabs and Narcotics Anonymous. “I don't think I like to admit that the daily grind of doing drugs becomes part of the identity, but I'm trying to work out how to shed that identity,” he says.
“This is the thing, I had this kind of realisation. I hate feeling like a victim. I'm proud of who I am and what I do. And I'm tired of being like this… this whole 'Oooh I'm so bad, I'm so sorry.' I obviously choose to get high. I like to get high. I must just accept the consequences of my choices.” At this moment Laband is defiant with self-destructive pride, but it's quickly followed by a sadness. “But it's ridiculous, all everyone ever wants to talk about, all everyone ever writes about is the drugs.”
Laband's studio feels isolated from the present, like a lair of a historian or ethnographer of the recent past. I am with him on the day Brett Murray's Zuma penis scandal explodes in the press, and suggest to him we go to the exhibition. The Goodman Gallery is about five blocks from his house. He suggests we go to Spur instead. On the way up to Rosebank Mall, through its leafy streets and slasto flat blocks, we talk about the Angolan War, Koevoet and Vlakplaas. He's tired, been up all night working on a commercial.
“I'm doing a lot of reading on the ANC/Inkatha clashes. Stuff that happened when I was at school that I didn't understand. I remember fearing it without knowing it,” he says. We discover the escalators are broken, we climb and wheeze. “Even the guy who took the fall for everyone, Eugene de Kock… At the end of the day, the only guy who visited him was a black guy from his unit at Koevoet, a guy who named his son Eugene de Kock.” Laband stops short to light a cigarette. “I think there is something in that, in that aspect, something I'm trying to understand. And it comes down to this: who are the guys who speak the African languages? The Dutchmen, the farmers. They're supposed to be the racists, but they're the ones who learn the languages. Not us English speakers.”
At the Spur entrance, we wait as Laband finishes his smoke. “As children of liberals, it's our opportunity to speak now, and if we don't do that then we are cowards. We weren't old enough or wise enough to do our thing then, because, well, my parents voted PFP [Progressive Federal Party], but they never said to me, 'What's happening, it's terrible.' They kept us in the dark.” He orders a burger and a lime milkshake and goes into the smoking cubicle for a cigarette.
Laband's father is Dr John Laband, a professor in African history, now based in Canada. He is the author of Zulu Identities: Being Zulu, Past and Present, among other books, and a recipient of the Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi Gold Medal for Service to the Zulu People. Laband's mother is an English teacher. There is a specific type of English emotional withholding among the liberals of old Natal, and I imagine this might be what Laband is talking about, that this is what's led to his insecurities and isolation.
When he comes out of the smoking room, he qualifies: “I've got wonderful parents, but they're not hippies, they're quite conservative. Aside from all the crap I put them through, we get on pretty well.” He pauses for a second, reaching. “I used to phone my mother at four in the morning, to ask for money. At the age of 30. It's so embarrassing.”
So would he want to live in another country, to escape the politics? “Whenever I go anywhere else, I want to come back. I can't be gone for more than four months.” Again I suggest we go to the Brett Murray exhibition, but Laband says no. It's time we heard some of the new album.
“Cambodia,” he says, snapping to attention. He had zoned out briefly at an ATM. “Lauren has a friend there. We can go stay, just to get away from this shit for a while, get some perspective after the album launch.” I am reminded of Melanie, the character in the hidden track on Laband's album 4/4 Down the Stairs. “It is not drugs Melanie seeks. It is purpose, reason for existence,” implores a woman's voice over the up-pulsing sequence.
Lauren (pronounced Loren) is Laband's partner of 10 years. A day or so before, while letting me listen to the samples of charismatic preachers she's sourced for him, he said, “Eventually, I want The Felix Laband Show to be tied to the visual. I hate common DJ-style visuals. I find it so obvious and crap, just a mishmash of stuff. I want to approach it almost like Kentridge uses life. But I also need someone to work with me, and I've realised that the best person is Lauren. She's the only person I trust. Artistically. I'm never sceptical of anything she makes.” In these moments, Laband has a penetrating honesty, something you can't but totally believe in.
Laband fell in love with kwaito at an early age, while growing up in Pietermaritzburg. “When I was at school, my girlfriend at the time, Janine, her maid's son gave me this Brothers of Peace album, Traffic Cop, you know? That was my first. And I just fell in love with it. I've been buying it ever since. The only music I buy is kwaito. All the white people's music I just download.”
Janine Tilley was Laband's first love while at school, and ostensibly the reason he moved to Jo'burg after a brief stint at art school in Durban. “One of the big reasons he wanted to move to Jo'burg was because of his deep respect and love for kwaito,” she tells me. “He used to listen to Brothers of Peace a lot. But in Durban, musicians are very thin on the ground. I think that was one of his dreams, to not just be this isolated rich white, but to actually work with what he loved.
“Felix was never happy with his physical appearance. He didn't like his big nose and his big lips, the gap in his teeth. He never found himself to be attractive.”
When Tilley speaks of Laband's formative years, it becomes easier to understand not only his insecurities but his unease with the legitimacy of the white man's take on kwaito. “It was apartheid, so it was still safe,” Tilley continues. “So we just ran around and hung out on the fields all night, and did fridge gas. It was another world that we don't really have today. He had strong relationships with amazing people, like Len Cockcroft [now of The Wild Eyes, and sometime part of Fingerhead], [artist] James Beckett and [artist and electronic musician] Dean Henning. And we used to have these incredible parties, largely initiated by our love for industrial music. We'd build smoke with fires and we'd have strobes and we'd listen to Skinny Puppy really loud and Fingerhead would jam. We just banded around Felix. People are drawn to him because he's down-to-earth and he's funny, you know? He's quite self-effacing, and he's quite, well, he's intensely romantic.”
Young and ambitious, Tilley moved to Jo'burg to work in film. Laband followed. Soon the relationship was over and Laband moved back to Durban, where he found himself making music for television adverts and honing his production talent. He started on his first solo album. He also began working with a kwaito performer.
“The only music I buy is kwaito. All the white people's music I just download.”
“There was this guy, Pappi.” Laband hands me a CD. It is a typical late-Nineties kwaito album cover, all bright colours, simple text, a dude flossing. “I made a bunch of stuff with him and none of it was released.” He takes the CD back, keeps it in his hand. “The problem was that they used to come to my house every day. Every day. Him and all of his mates, while I was trying to finish Thin Shoes. And that's part of the reason I left Durban. I just left. I couldn't face having to tell them. So I went to Cape Town.”
I'm taken aback by this. Here was the very thing that he was seeking, the opportunity to produce real KZN kwaito, and he walked away from it? Laband registers my scepticism. “Just after I got to Cape Town, he got my number from somewhere and we spoke. It was great. I'd love to get hold of him now, see what he's doing. We were actually quite close; they started to take me to a lot of their parties. I was the only whitey there. I think they liked me.”
Laband has a crippling awareness of the accepted place of a white person in the field of kwaito. It's part of why he shies away from the task. “There is nothing worse,” he tells me, “than those Danny K and Mandoza things; they make me want to puke. It's like the advert with the one black guy, and they're all up in the yacht or something? Ja, right. Or there's the one white guy just sitting there, looking transformed. It's a joke.” And he would like nothing more than to change this. It is his defining mission; one he hasn't figured out a strategy for yet.
“I've always loved the rhythms, and the vocal rhythms. I just hate the way I can't understand, I can't speak the fucking language, you know?” Laband places the Pappi CD back on his bookshelf. “It's basically, if you understand maskandi, you would understand why all those guys from Durban are so good, because it's in their blood. Maskandi is now what kwaito is today.”
And there it is. Laband adores the music but doesn't speak the language. He is on the outside and it embarrasses him, yet he hasn't taken the step to learn Zulu. “I think it's a subconscious imperial fucking thing – we've been taught that if we speak English we are superior, and that they must speak to us [in English].”
So is this why he hasn't continued his quest for collaboration? “There are guys who I really respect and want to work with, but I'm nervous of it,” he replies. “It's kind of like wanting to ask the cheerleader out and being nervous of rejection. And I've been away from the scene so long that I don't really have a name. No one knows who I am any more. I'm waiting to release this album so they take me seriously.” He points at his kwaito collection. “I want to work with the older guys like Spikiri. I really want to work with Professor but I've heard he's quite difficult. Who knows? But I guess I'm difficult too.”
Laband is in the grip of a dilemma, leaning forward on his chair and punctuating his sentences by pointing at me. In an attempt to cut the tension, I affirm that he has a reputation for being difficult. I mean it as a joke. He is visibly cut by this.
“Do people still think of me as a dick?” He gets quite anxious, starts pacing around his studio space, stubbing out his cigarette. “It's when I'm insecure that I put other people down. I don't have any apologies because I don't feel I need to make any. When I was younger, yes, but not now. My motives are more clear. I had a stint when it was about ego, but that's not what I want. I can't stand the failure from building myself up so high.”
It might be true that a few of the older kwaito musicians don't know Laband's work. But that's not to say he's been forgotten, or unknown. Witness the crowd response at any of his recent gigs, the immense draw he has at festivals. And hear the awe in the voices of musicians who become fanboys the moment you mention his name.
“Well,” says BLK JKS guitarist Mpumi Mcata, “I think he had a substantial influence over that whole heavy bass era of kwaito production: the Yizo-Yizo, 'Donkey Rattle' generation, if you will. His music is really open, vulnerable, not trapped in itself. It's ready and honest, which is rare in the world of electronic music!”
Warrick Sony, of The Kalahari Surfers, who has worked with Laband over the years, agrees. “More interesting, though, is his usage of kwaito. It's a funny subtlety, the way that's seeped in, even in his earlier stuff,” says Sony. “His music always had that ethereal heroin thing about it, that 'thin' sound. That Thin Shoes sound. I don't know what it is. You can hear it in The Velvet Underground, you know. It's a trance-y thing, a dronal thing, but it's also a frequency thing. It's more Indian and it's avoiding aggression too.”
Laband's former label boss from African Dope, Hilton “Roach” Roth, says it best. “There is a scene in a Bond movie, where the villain says, 'The distance between insanity and genius is measured only by success.' That's Felix for me.”
When Laband asks me what people are saying about him “out there”, I tell him. “They want you to release this album already.” He's blunt about its delay. “I've created this pressure. I am aware of the fact that I'm not just another electronic musician, I know I'm doing something special. And I've been rewarded in the sense that I have listeners far afield. And so often people tell me that my albums have meant so much to them, that I don't want to let them down.” A pause, a drag on his Aspen. “I don't want to become another Goldfish in stonewashed jeans just doing a tour. I mean, I could have already been on a whole different path, if I had moved to Europe and not gotten caught up in all this crap over here. Although, I don't know how much I really…” He looks at me, to make sure I understand. “Do you know what I mean? It's almost been cool for me.”
When he finally plays me nearly two hours of what will eventually become Deaf Safari, what is revealed is this: he's angry. He's built worlds of rhythm, but this time with the vocal clicks of South African languages, discarding meaning for rhythm. And he has an incredible, mystifying singing voice. “I think I can sing,” he says, “I mean I used to be in bands.”
So when did he decide to go electronic? “The problem was that I was always the leader of the band. And I suppose every band needs somebody but it's a bit crap, always telling everyone what to do,” he says. “Then after school you actually have to make a living out of it. To be in a real band, other people need to be as committed as you are. The best time to be in a band is during school. You've got nothing else to do, and you can play in someone's garage. Poor parents. Jesus, it was so loud. You've got no idea how loud it is to be in a band.” He selects more of the album to play for me and shuffles off to make coffee, apologising for the chaos of his kitchen.
“Anyway,” he says, returning, “these days I have to work pretty fucking quietly because I can't afford to have a studio as well. I like the comfort of my own space. But it doesn't really work because I can't play loud and I think it's been affecting my music in some ways. When you play through a big sound system, one sound without much else has a lot more impact than a whole bunch of sounds. I tend to be overcrowding my new stuff a little bit.” He selects another track, abruptly stopping in the middle of a mesmerising song that may or may not be called “Bag of Bones”.
“Anyway, I'm not happy with it yet. It's cool, but it's not ready. I'm missing a layer, the last part, which is normally the easiest for me. It's usually the part I struggle with least, the melodies, the vocal, the guitar. But it's the stuff I'm struggling with most. I'm maybe scared that I don't have those melodies any more.” From what I have just heard, he's wrong.
Laband is moving into protest electronica, utilising politically incorrect and polarising samples of political rallies and religious sermons. And it's not surprising, given his liberal upbringing, punk roots and all the time spent hanging out with sonic terrorists such as Jan Welter, Syd Kitchen and Live Jimi Presley in the early Nineties. But how does just using a sample of something say anything about it?
“It used to work around… A song would begin with a sample, I would use that to create a key, or whatnot,” he replies. “But these days it's been more an idea, like I want to try this or try that. I've always liked the way you can take a sample of someone crying and, with the right music and the right context, you can make it sound like they're having sex. I like using samples that are quite hard, taking someone who is saying something hectic and then making the music beautiful. It gives it a lot of power. Controlling the way the statement is consumed. I've got this song called 'Kill the Boer'. It's all these samples of people singing dubhula ibhunu.”
He stops for a second, wondering if he got the phrase right. “I'm turning it into what is hopefully quite a cool song. I have to. It's a statement on how we are playing with fire. If we look at history in all the instances where it was socially acceptable to say such hectic things and get away with it, like Nazi Germany or Rwanda before the genocide, where people could actually get away with saying 'kill these people'… It's quite a heavy thing to get away with and I don't think we should take it lightly.”
He pauses. Inhales, exhales, shrugs. “A lot of it is going to be political. This is not going to be an album you can put on and take a bubble bath to. I'm tired of that. I grew up on punk music. My poor mother had to listen to it in the car.
“I used to purposefully not listen to any other electronica, and that was good for me – I've been exposed to the world of mp3s, I've been given entire record collections from a variety of musicians and DJs, just ridiculous amounts of music. And it frightened me.” He takes a moment, trying to place the fear. “I think, subconsciously, it's affected how I've been doing things without me realising it. I don't even know if people will hear all the stuff I'm putting in. Because no doubt it will be listened to the way I now listen to music, with my mouse, in five seconds…” His voice rises, his thoughts speeding up.
“The thing I'm struggling with the most at this stage is finding anything to hold onto that makes me feel good or excites me about the world, or music as a whole. Or what it means to be an artist. Or like, the respect that you should have created by being an artist your whole life, instead of this from zero to hero in 10 seconds new world order. It upsets me quite a lot. These days everything is so attainable. To get to a sound that is considered a song can take two minutes with pre-settings. It doesn't require much skill. When I started this, we had to have more equipment; now you can do everything inside the computer. I prefer to use equipment; it gives you your own sound and your own thing. Analogue synths and desks and stuff.”
He's gone back to his workspace, intensely staring into the graffitied CRT [old-style] monitor. “But what's irritating me the most about the album is the polishedness of it. It's started to become how I imagine creating a stop-frame animation. To create a minute of music will take three weeks. I've started recording endless options. When you have no limitations you end up with crap.”
He pauses to do some mental arithmetic. “But yes, there are about 150 titles in progress. I think I've narrowed it down to 25 or 30 that I think are cool. My idea is that the ones that finish themselves are the ones that are supposed to be finished. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Something bad, I know. I have this feeling it's all going to come together in a stroke of lightning. And I'll just finish everything down in one go. I want it to be this punk recording and that's it.”
Scattered around his workspace — mixed in with the pads, desks and guitars — are scrapbooks, notebooks, cut up magazines, glue and pens. “I'm quite fluent with scissors,” he says. “This album, it's been a process, almost to ease my mind a little bit. With cutting things up, it's kind of a release for me. I suppose some people would go for a run. I make my books. The process where I get ready for a three-, four-, five-day non-stop session with a song… I begin that with a new page that I stick things on, write ideas on, stuff like that. It started off being more fun, porn, noise, mess stuff.”
He pulls out the box of notebooks, starts piling them onto the floor. He begins flipping through them maniacally, past images of women cut up, spliced, heels and hands trimmed to sharp points, giant mouths, text. “It started off more of just a mess. I collect and dismember old National Geographics. I'm very into the qualities of the print; if you use a magazine from the Seventies it's so different. I'm very much into the different textures.”
Like the textures of samples? “It's a way of using crap source material. With music and art it's the same thing; it's the context that you place it in that gives it relevance. I like doing it by hand; you're forced to work with the size, and you can't shrink or cheat.”
There are pages of porn images where he has cut the genitalia out, leaving negative white spaces of cock. I remark on them. “Trasi Henen copied that, the bitch,” he says and then quickly moves on. “And now it's not so much as punk, it's more thought about, as my own spacing. I'm enjoying cutting shapes out of things that don't exist, working with stuff I can't resize.”
He's got his scissors out now and is cutting up something. He zones out on the blades cutting through the paper, slows down, puts it on the page, moves it around, cigarette dangling from his lips. Sticks it down, scribbles “Deaf Safari” on it, then black spirals.
“It's fucking me up,” he blurts out. “I never really understood MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface], so all my synths and shit I would record as audio, and it's the same as collaging. You can chop it up and shit and do what you want, but you can't change its DNA. And now, well, the rabbit hole, I haven't got out.”
He stands up and goes to get another box of notebooks, mumbling, “Millions of these damn things, these small books, more notes. The Prestik marks, coming through here.”
I remark on how all the teeth in the cut-out images are blacked out. “Maybe it's due to the fact that my own teeth are barely there any more. I've basically destroyed them.”
And as you destroy your own teeth, you destroy other people's? “I've never thought of it like that,” he says. “I mean, I've always grown up with a gap. Which I've sort of grown to like, because it gives you a naughty sort of thing. But now I've got a gap at the bottom.” He pulls back his gums. “Look at that, dude.” His gums have receded; his teeth bare the rot of years of drug use. “All these gaps, all from the drugs, it's bad, bad, bad.”
Laband has said in the past that he's afraid to come off the drugs, because he's worried that he will lose his ability to make music. He's in this half-lit world now, where he knows his dark days must come to an end, either way. He has a cocky pride in the extremes he has gone to. He is reaching towards emergence, while fearing it. Scared of not measuring up. It's exactly the same Felix Laband I met in Durban back when he was making Thin Shoes, before the drugs took hold. He was as scattered, as manic; a hoarder of sounds who felt unsure of his legitimacy. He hasn't changed, and the drugs have very little to do with his genius. This is not something I can explain to him. His life is a reflection of the agonies of our time.
He dumps another box of notebooks on the rickety faded couch. I start flipping through them. “Are these lyrics?” I ask. “No, they're the things I thought I would complete that day. Lists. I should call this album Lists. Unfinished Lists.”
Recently, Laband had an incident with the ANC. He had posted a picture on Facebook of himself at six years old, playing horsey with another boy, riding on this kid's back. The other boy was black, the son of a farm hand. He tagged a friend of his in the picture, who, Laband tells me, was enraged by the implication and accused him of being a “typical Natal Midlands little boertjie boy”. Then in 2011 it was used, without permission, in the ANC election campaign with the slogan: “See if they won't do it again.” A minor blog storm erupted: enraged white people asked how could it be that such an innocent childhood game could be framed as racism. When I ask him about it, he just says, “I don't really want to talk about it yet. It's going to resurface and I don't know how to explain how I feel about it.”
This is what you hear on Deaf Safari, this struggle. Laband is trying to work out the strange politics of this land, while doubting his legitimacy as an English-only-speaking son of liberals. You can hear him lurching through the twilight, disturbing the silt of the recent past, trying to escape with his soul intact.
The photographer arrives. Laband jokes around with him about the state of the studio and starts unhooking the blankets to let more light in, the heaviness of what we've been talking about dissipated by the unfamiliarity of a new person in the studio.
There is one question I haven't asked him yet, about an unreleased album, from back in Cape Town, called Guavarama.
He stops with the blankets. “It's an electro-punk thing, I made it the same time as Dark Days Exit. It was a product of me and Mark van Niekerk playing together. He is the greatest musician I've ever worked with and I ruined our relationship.” Then Laband breaks off to pose on the couch. “Please, I'm old,” he says to the photographer, laughing. “Try not to make me look too damaged.”
As we're getting ready to leave, he steers the conversation back to Van Niekerk. “Honestly, he's a genius. He's the one musician I'm most comfortable with. He ended up having to be my mother. I pushed his friendship to the limits. He made up his mind to stay clear of me. I have to prove myself to him; hopefully I can win him back. I've let a lot of people down. My honesty buys me leeway to behave badly.” And then, like someone who knows his purpose, his reason for existence, Laband says: “The only thing that will be enough will be for me to follow through. To do everything I promised I would do.”
Rolling Stone South Africa — August 2012
Photograph by David Southwood
After 20 years in the game, the "Moses" of Cape Flats hip-hop remains at a crossroads
from archive roger graeme young
Words and photography by ROGER YOUNG
“Can you go to other countries if you have a criminal record?” Isaac Mutant leans toward me on the way back from a park jam in Paarl Valley. Depends on the crime, I shrug him off. I don't press for details because, over the last few weeks, while he's been upfront about everything else, Mutant has been non-committal on only two subjects: his relationship with his ex-wife and the mother of his daughter, and his ties with Flats gangs.
When I ask him straight up if he'd ever gone to prison he replies, “No comment,” and pauses. “I want you to put that in, that I said 'no comment' to that question.” I promise him that I will. “Duidelik,” he says, “Duidelik. Now, next question.” The information, I guess, would be easily obtainable. But what Isaac's real name is, I never think to ask; this is the one thing I keep losing sight of. Isaac Mutant is a fiction, yet he's the realest motherfucker I've ever met.
It's typical early summer weather in the PV ghetto. The pink and grey stacks of Magnolia Flats are vibrating in the heat and an old truck is pulled up as a stage. People are on the outside stairs, their lawn chairs, in the boots of their cars, drinking quarts, drinking hot nips, drinking in the ebb and flow of the levels of skill jumping up on the truck.
They're putting their fears out there — their hopes, their need to be seen, guided by the old heads and their clipboards, the Caravelle as the sound desk, as the backstage, as the place where the women sit. Children and dogs and rhymes running about — innocent, hungry, dissatisfied and proud.
In the middle of it all scowls Isaac Mutant, aka Ike Deny, aka DJ Brooke Squirter, formerly Rebel MC, formerly Yucky Stuff, formerly of Bad Influence and Trampled Multitude, one-time part of Plein Madness, once Planet Base B-boy, major contributor to the first Die Antwoord album, and all-around pissed-off and frustrated Kaapse rapper. He's tired of the boom-bap beats and the calls to consciousness. “For me personally, the hip-hop industry, the rap industry in South Africa is kak boring,” he tells me. “It's poes boring, nobody comes up with edgy fucken ideas and gets kakked out and get fucken thrown out of the club. I want to have bergies on stage with me and they must sommer just take a shit, right there, on the stage.”
But Mutant himself would be the last to diss the togetherness of the park jam scene. “Brasse are actually hooking up people from this side and that side. It's always gonna be this whole gang mentality; tribe mentality is always gonna be there. But people don't fight anymore. People are actually squashing beef,” he tells me. His frustration lies with the fact that dropping tracks hasn't, in the 20 years he's been a part of the scene, ever presented a viable way to survive — not really, and not for anyone he knows.
When he arrives here in the PV, he's greeted with acquiescence. Brasse in snap backs do the head dip, give him reverence, get him drinks, want to know what he's up to; will he perhaps drop a rhyme or two? The younger MCs standing off to the sides are just looking at him, just checking him the fuck out. Later in the afternoon, a young MC asks him what his rate is. “Why even ask me?” Mutant says to me later. “After Die Antwoord, he [the young MC] can't afford me. I tell him, 'rather tell me what you got and I'll see if I can do you a favour. But don't ask for my rate. You can't afford my rate.' “
Mutant is equal parts braggadocio and frustrated artist. He just doesn't want to work within the old parameters of hip-hop. At the moment, his greatest challenge is figuring out how to communicate his mythical post-Flats hip-hop land of freedom to his many collaborators (actual, potential or otherwise).
He's on the verge of recording his third album, or rather, Mutant is on the edge of discovery, lurching toward his third album. All he really knows is that he wants to piss people off and get paid. He's been working with SAMA-winning producer Ghalik Jacobs on a few tracks. Len Cockcroft of Tannhauser Gate has been laying down some beats for him. So has Dplanet of Pioneer Unit, as well as DJ Big Space. He's also mentioned a track with Soul Candi and a possible collaboration with Jay. How many of these will come to fruition is hard to say, for, combined with the usual trials of being a musician are Mutant's frequent black moods and occasional crippling bouts of ennui.
“These guys they call me and they want to offer me a deal.” Mutant is talking about trying to get this album made. “They say 'come, we'll give you sixty grand. We'll give it to you now.' They say 'come, forty grand today, just sign this. Twenty when the album is done.' For what? They think because I'm from the Flats I'm stupid? I tell them, buy me a fucking house! Then we can talk.” Mutant lives on a spare bed at his sister's place. He hustles every day — how tempting that sixty grand must have been… He's holding out for a bigger prize though. He doesn't tell me who “these guys” are.
But why has it taken so long to start recording again, just over six years now since he recorded The Unreleased Vol. 1? “Personally, I wrote my third album like fucking probably seven times, eight times, and I just never felt it. It was gonna be called 'A Freak New Evil', the subtitle would be 'Armageddon: The Musical'. I never felt it. Few tracks was dope. I was never satisfied with it. I refused to put something out that I don't feel, that's not good enough for the people… And my whole fucken book, my third album, I think got stolen, but let's just say I lost it a week before I was supposed to go into studio.”
In the darkness of a mid-morning bar in Plumstead, Isaac sits with DJ Roach, his sidekick and beat-dropper. They're here for some tattoo business at Kanasashi and because their dealer lives nearby. “You see, especially Afrikaans MCs have got this problem — we're too technical, lyrically. Jack Parow is easy, easy lyrics. How can I put this? I don't wanna rap for rappers. My lyrics are extremely coded and layered and whatnot, it's not easy enough, but now I'm tryna…” he searches, shrugs a bit. Roach interjects, “Dumb it down a bit.” Isaac jumps straight back in: “But still be clever. Catchy, catchy. That 'Doos Dronk' is a clever fucking track. You check 'Enter the Ninja', I dig that fucking track because it can compete with the world market according to the fucking formula.” It's the first time that Die Antwoord comes up, and it won't be the last. “Ja look, my first album was a concept album. It was very arty. I made it for me. The second album is where Cape Town hip-hop is today. It's too boom-bap, it's too hip-hop. You shouldn't have to stand still in a club and listen to the lyric … that's my problem. Because since I've been with him,” he motions to Roach, “I've been clubbing. So I kind of dig jolling, I dig the jol. I'm always on the dance floor my bru.”
Roach pulls out a bag of compacted marijuana and shows it to me. “We can break this up and double our money.” So this is the hustle? “You know who I appreciate?” asks Mutant. “Walter White [from Breaking Bad]. I got three tik recipes in case this rap thing doesn't work out.”
Two men with clipboards enter and start pointing out fire extinguishers and inspecting basins. Health inspectors. Roach, who looks like a hip-hop panda, leans back in his chair, rolling a joint on his stomach. “You won't believe the feedback that Isaac's been getting from the States, people asking him to translate his songs for them,” he says. “And this is the fucken thing with kak like Die Antwoord,” Mutant jumps in. “It's that no one here paid any attention to it until like someone picked up on it overseas. But it's cool because for me, like the whole world is now zoning on this.”
Roach puts the joint behind his ear. Isaac takes a swig of his beer. “Every night I have to learn this one American bra from Seattle Afrikaans. I have to teach him Afrikaans on Facebook. Like, what does 'poes' mean? 'Jou ma se poes', what does that mean? I have to teach him slang. Everybody says 'you the dude to speak to'. I googled it. 'You the bra, you the fucken rudest coloured bra.' This naai's from Seattle. OK cool, first thing you need to learn is 'jou ma se poes'. Then there's this white chick who actually studies Afrikaans as a subject in the States. She speaks Afrikaans to me; very clumsy though. Not even white South African clumsy, like black South African clumsy.” Roach interjects: “It's a lot of fun because she actually phoned Isaac one day and he usually gives out my number 'cos his phone is kak unreliable. So I answer the phone like, 'Yo, who is this?' and then she says, 'Baie dankie.' I was like, what the fuck … in a New York accent, my bru!” Isaac busts out laughing, covering his mouth in the loose hip-hop fist of disbelief.
“The idea was … to make fun of this whole bling thing, while at the same time trying to sound bling or glamorous.”
Open mic night at Purple Turtle, the everlasting dodgy alternative bar near Greenmarket Square, has become the only fixed regular inner city hip-hop hangout since DJ Real Rozzano's iBuyambo (an arts centre in Cape Town) burnt down a few months back. Roach and Mutant are just hanging out, checking out the new blood, the new talent. A couple of mini-skirted girls come out of the Grandslots area, loaded with cheap bling. They flirt with Mutant and then vanish out the front door. The crowd here is a curious mix of young hip-hoppers and bar trash. A trickle of battle-weary sex workers pass through from some back stairs. “Prostitutes,” Mutant says to me, the glow of the UV trance décor highlighting his creasing forehead. “Prostitutes are the answer to everything.”
A young girl gets on stage. “Check out this chick, bra, this girl is the future.” Her name is Andy Leigh and she's self-effacing with an off-beat flow, a mix of Uhuru smarts and the excitement of youth. “We need more females to do their shit,” Mutant nods his head enthusiastically in agreement with himself. “Men need to be put in their place, ou bra, because it's becoming an egotistical thing, opposing to merit. And who's got the biggest dick and the thickest voice. Now, if a small little girl, chick or woman, whatever, if a female come up with the maddest, like, you know, Lady of Rage fucking skills and blow everybody the fuck up, then it will change the game.”
A young dude jumps up and raps in a mixture of vernac and American phrasing, liberally peppered with “yo-yo-yo”s. Mutant's mood changes in a flash. “Brasse like these are the ones that are always saying, 'Keep it real'. How can you keep it real with an American accent? It's like that Youngsta guy; he's not good, he just drops a fuckload of mixtapes, quantity not quality. Ag, man, hip-hop is dead. Globally. And I've watched it die.”
He seems weary of it all, but then climbs on stage and rips hip-hop a new asshole. Full of fire and dexterity, he delivers one of his new tracks, “Mapuza”. The tiny crowd goes apeshit as he spits, “Ek is moeg van praat van revolution man/Fok die revolution/Ons maak soos Saddam Hussein/Elke woord, elke letter, soos'ie lood van Baretta/Idioot, hardheaded/Ek is daai soort wat sal quit, voor ek quit.”
He's on and then off-stage in an instant, but the energy in the room has been electrified. “The blacks like me because I sing 'fuck the cops',” he says, wiping his forehead as the whores from upstairs waddle past, leaving pools of cheap perfume in the air, dirty stares at our pants, a wake of disdain.
Mutant often refers to himself as “Third Generation Base Scene”. He's talking about a golden era in Cape hip-hop, the tail-end of the '80s where the heads revolved around Planet Base (also known as The Base) in Shortmarket Street in Cape Town. This was the place where Ready D cut his teeth, where Public Enemy albums that had been sneaked into the country were first dropped, where Black Noise and Prophets of Da City (POC) rose to prominence, where the seeds of African Hip-Hop Movement and King Jamo's Zulu Hip Hop Movement were sown; where young kids hung around in high-tops, full of rage and idealism and hope, flexing the first muscles of graf and B-boying in South Africa.
DJ Real Rozzano puts it thus: “Heads were connected, had beefs but still partied together because of the common interest in hip-hop. It was apartheid years and hip-hop united black, brown and white youths. We were moving between the townships of Mitchells Plain, Gugulethu, the Strand, Sea Point and Tamboerskloof. Songs were big at The Base on the dance floor, but emptied the dance floors in other clubs!”
Mutant was part of this scene, B-boying, beatboxing, laying down graf and, by 1988, rapping at The Base and the community events organised by Ready D and Rozzano. On “Mixtapes”, off his first album, you can practically feel the afterglow. “'Mixtapes' was actually influenced by a track that POC did back in the day. They had a track about the same thing. How it used to be back in the day: 'Oupa Jimmy, Oupa Jimmy kom oor die brug,' so I'm like, 'Yoh, fucking yarre, ou pel.' “ You can sense the longing while he talks, the frustration melted away by nostalgia. “It was closely-knit, number one,” Mutant tells me.
“We didn't even have all those luxuries [they had]. I wouldn't even blame those things but we kind of had a goal at that time. That time was a beautiful time. It was a brilliant time for people that was in hip-hop, because it was apartheid, bra. You know, fucking apartheid was a moerse fucking … it was a battle to fight, my bru. You didn't have time to think about ego and bullshit, it's like make or break. It's a war, bru.
“And what we were aiming at was fighting this war peacefully — that was the core of hip-hop that time. Gandhi-type of a principle. And this generation was there, they didn't belong anywhere, you know. Either you gonna be a gangsta or you gonna be this or you gonna be that. Then what happened was — I don't know if you know about this — but then the punk nation was in at that time. I was a punk at that time, also. People were rebelling against stuff. It was an anti-establishment thing. So I think majority of the hip-hoppers of that time became punk rockers just for that thing. It was gangster without being gangster. At the same time we used other vehicles like comradeship fighting apartheid, but with that came other shit … fighting gangsterism, or negativity rather, and camaraderie and that kind of a thing. And those codes are disappearing today.”
When Mutant considers, he looks at the ground, thinking, his brow knotting, puzzling it through. “That's actually one of the reasons why I wrote that track, because something fucking went wrong. I personally think the ouens didn't have anything to fight for anymore. I don't know, the old school, the old brasse grew up, reality kicked in, a majority of the brasse went to go work, not hip-hoppers anymore, but they went on with their lives. So they kind of lost that thing … reality kicked in. We kind of lack purpose right now.”
So does hip-hop need a power to fight? “People are realising something. I don't know what, whatever it is. I think it is getting there again. Every empire have to fall. People are looking at each other like 'Who's gonna say shit first? Who's gonna say this first.' Look man, it's like a kettle that boils, bra. People are getting more angry now; we are identifying an enemy or fighting towards something.”
We're walking to a shebeen just down the road from where Mutant lives. As we get to a crossroads, he hesitates and then we make a right. He doesn't want to go down that road, he tells me. It's a long story … something to do with his sister's nephew, something to do with him not wanting to get involved, something about it not being his place. Something about not wanting to get gemung for fucking some brasse up. We walk past a school. A kid on a BMX rides past and drops a small package through the window of a parked car. “Just like the movies,” says Mutant.
Back up in his sister's apartment, above a spares shop on Belgravia Road in Athlone, the beers are cracked open. “This is what you hear in the ghetto the whole time: 'Yoh Isaac, djy rap so kwaai, djy moet vorentoe gan.' What the fuck does that mean? Basically, they trying to say, I think, 'Bru, you must just get up and you will be successful.' Then my next question is: 'Define success.' People actually fucking listen to what the fuck I'm saying. So for me, I'm successful.”
But when it comes down to it, Mutant is a realist. “I'm a moerse fan of Bob Marley, you know, the greats: Jimmy Hendrix, Kurt Cobain. Bob Marley, that bra fucking touches, he converts, he makes Rastas still today and he's dead how many years, you check? You leave a mark that fucking big on the world, ou bra, nobody can ever touch that kak. I still do have those kind of principles but then the reality kicks in. Look man, it's cool, but you need to eat.”
I ask Mutant if he's got a message, if he's talking to a flock. “Nobody likes to be preached to. The moment you try become a hero or a preacher, it leaves too much open spaces.” He takes a long draw on his beer, pours another glass. “So, what do you do? You become a villain. Everyone loves a villain in a movie. That's why everyone remembers Castor Troy [a character in Face/Off]. Satan in a movie. I'm not in a position to preach to anybody. I'm fucked up. I've been a gangster, you know. Currently, I'm a Satanist apparently, but it's cool. Never be fucking boring.”
For Isaac, it's all part of the same connected story. “Those brasse taught me respect and disipline. You have to go back to the ghetto to see how these brasse hustle for something small. These brasse hustle for potatoes, my bru. You don't have time to sleep late because you fucking hungry — where the fuck is your lunch gonna come from? You don't even need lunch; lunch is a fucking luxury. Plus I do deal in some shit, time and again when I'm kak broke so I do need those brasse as well.”
While getting a gatsby somewhere in the ghetto, an old man (possibly handicapped) hovers near us, anxious for scraps. Roach collects all our unfinished chips while Mutant goes outside to smoke. Across the road is a derelict second-storey nightclub called The Point. He points it out. “I always thought that would be a kwaai name for a band, because The Point is Sabela [a word he describes as 'an extremely secretive language, or supposed to be, from jail']. So most people will just think it's just another name but brasse that know, will know. And all the other dwankies will be in the dark.”
“Dwankie” is a word I've only encountered on Die Antwoord's Tension album. “Ja, dwankie,” says Mutant shaking his head. “Ninja must have got that from Kim. My ex-wife. She's Ninja's assistant now.”
So, does Mutant think Ninja used him? “Kykie, Ninja is my bra, my tjommie. He helped me, I helped him.” But people have said that Die Antwoord should have taken you with them. “I'm not a sidekick. People who say that are actually being disrespectful of me. Die Antwoord raised the game, and because hip-hop is in a sensitive spot, people don't know what to do. So Die Antwoord really fuck people's idea of what is hip-hop; they've shown what you can do. So obviously people feel they have to try break them down and make out that they've done something kak because all those brasse been doing is sitting at home complaining.” He wrestles the last drag out of his cigarette and throws it to the kerb. “I shouldn't even tell you this, but me and Ninja have a project. I was going to change my name to Kaffir. Maybe we'll still do it one day.”
Out in Grassy Park, Mutant is playing Nas to Ghalik Jacobs. Ghalik responds with Little Dragon and something “from West Africa”. Ghalik is an old gent in a fading cardigan, whose garden is overflowing with the detritus of a DIY hoarder: rusted bathtubs, fucked aquariums, fucked cars, dog shit and other landmines. The studio itself is in construction, or deconstruction. The mic room is an old bedroom replete with open empty cupboards. “It gives the sound of the room a nice feel.” Ghalik is clearly a pro of the old-school variety. He's discussing the intricacies of recording a live band instead of laying down beats, his giant mixing desk covered in felt. Roach takes care of the joint and soon the room is filled with a lazy smoke while Ghalik talks about slow jazz. Mutant is getting edgy, he just wants to lay down a track. Finally when it happens, Ike blazing down a track that centres around the line “You mustn't push me”, but pronounced “Jou ma se poes, me”. Ghalik just shakes his head. “Isaac, man, the things you say, man.” It's an unlikely combination, these two working together, and you have to wonder if Mutant has chosen to work with Ghalik out of want or need. Listening to the playback, Ghalik says: “Isaac, you must understand, we have to do this slowly. It might take a year or so, just work on it track by track. I'm thinking this one would be nice with some piano.”
Driving back to Plumstead, Mutant is tired, not even pissed off. “It's kak frustrating. I'm kak intense when I work, when I record and when I write and I'm kak fast about shit. I'm the asshole in the industry, that kind of personality.” Is he difficult to work with? “Personally for me, no, I don't think I'm difficult to work with. People tend to think that I'm difficult to work with because I just wanna be right.” He's in a listless space. “Whatever happens, happens. If it takes six months it's cool. I'll allow it, it's cool. Ghalik is the most professional sound engineer I've ever worked with. His know-how and my know-how. Die Antwoord and Jack Parow raised the bar, so I need to raise my bar. To answer your question, is it frustrating? Everything is frustrating to me, and it's cool. I feed off frustration. I'm fucking angry all the time.”
It feels like the response of someone who has long since given up on any of his dreams coming true, but has been fighting for his place in the sun so long he doesn't know any other way of being.
“I hear a lot, like on the street you know, or Facebook. Facebook is now the newspaper. So I hear a lot about 'Yoh, they bumped your tracks last night, they bumped this, they bumped that'. Bush Radio, they bump my shit all the time. The Cipher Session; Ready D's doing that kinda thing right now. And then it's mos now internet radio; Hemelbesem's got a thing, RickLo got a thing so they bumping our shit all the time. I realised – jy my bru, people are digging this track.”
Back in his sister's flat, Mutant is talking about his underground hit, “Sorry Girl”. “What I did was, I made CDs, almost like mixtapes of my shit, then I went to taxi ranks, shebeens, smokkelhuise. I just distributed there for free.”
He takes in the scope of the song's reach. “So, I travel a lot, right, so I go to PV, to Paarl, I go to Ocean View, everywhere. I went to Vredendal. Me and Scally went to perform there and those people were fucking 'Yoh Isaac, “Sorry Girl”, “Sorry Girl” '. I fucking hate that song, but everybody's just raving about it. People mail me right over South Africa about that song. I recorded that track in 2005, I think. Since then till now, 2012, everybody's just fucking talking about that.”
It's clear that the track's popularity is a bit of a mystery to him, as well as a source of pride: “So Antjie Krog hired me for some poetry besigheid a few years back.”
We're down to the last of the beer.
“She wanted me specifically to do that track 'Sorry Girl' and another song, I think ''n Hoender wat nie kekkel nie' (a chicken that doesn't cackle) or some bullshit. Ja, fuck my bru — whaaat? I used to be a moerse Antjie Krog fan but I'm not gonna go into the politics of that day.”
I'm taken by surprise by this, but getting any detail about the Antjie Krog beef proves useless.
“The funny thing about that track is I wrote it for this chick, not for marketing or sales purposes and whatnot. I just gave it to somebody after I recorded it, two or three people, 'What do you think about this song?' Because I wanted to send it to this chick. But then it leaked from there.”
He leans back, and kinda shrugs it off: “I didn't write it as an MC. I know how to rhyme in any case. Just tell the story my bru, just maak toe jou oë (close your eyes). Just tell the story, not rap. That's kind of how I do mixtapes and I didn't care whether it was successful or not. I don't dig being too technical about MC-ing. Just fucking tell the story. The story is an extension of you.”
Mutant mixes languages and slangs when he raps, and the result is hard on the ears to those who don't speak Afrikaans.
“I'm just naturally a fucken aggressive person. I'm loud and I look like I look all the time. To answer your question: no. It's just another language. It is extremely aggressive, but it's just another language. Like, Cape Flats slang is just another tool. Language, words are just tools you need to bring this story across. Because the background and the language that I speak and express myself in don't define Isaac Mutant.”
But, as he has said, there are so many things to balance off each other; it's not just about teaching Afrikaans to Americans. Mutant is really more concerned with speaking to his own people. “The coloured culture is extremely unique and Sabela – the way we talk – is extremely unique. Only a few people know how to Sabela properly,” he explains. “Not everybody back in the day could've said 'Hosh!' and 'Aweh!'. It's not as secretive as it used to be. I just need to understand what is allowed and what is not allowed and why. What was the point of the Nommer [the “Number” refers to rival prison gangs] in the first place? So I can respect their shit.”
It comes back to the message, to the medium. The way Mutant communicates is what he is communicating. The combination of languages, slangs and styles is actually greater than the content of the individual tracks. Isaac Mutant is an old-school head, but he's futuristic as fuck.
“There was this one incident,” he recalls. “My crew is called Koloured Ass Krooks — KAK. But now, when Afrikaans hip-hop was starting to bud and more crews were being born, people misunderstand what this Koloured Ass thing and Isaac Mutant stand for. Especially Afrikaans coloured brasse, rappers.”
He sees I'm not quite understanding.
“Let me put it to you like this,” he says. “It was on Myspace, that was before Facebook. I got this one email: 'Isaac Mutant, you're the Moses of the coloureds.' I'm like, 'Thanks man.' And the vraag comes straight back: 'Yo bru, what are these darkies about … “new South Africa”.' So I'm like, 'Hold the fuck up, bra!' And then I got a vrag emails after that from different people: 'Yo, what is these whities about – hulle kan sien onse Chappies [tattoos] en wat-wat [and what-what],' and I'm like, 'Bra, it's not even like that.'
“That kind of changed my perception for shit. I'm just proudly coloured. I'm not anti-anything. So I'm like, 'Kykie man, you need to understand something. I come from an era where hip-hop knows no colour. We never saw colour, we never saw religion. It wasn't like that. We saw entities. The moment you call yourself a “head”, you're different from society.' That's the core of things.”
So where's the land of milk and honey? I joke with him. But it's no laughing matter.
“I watched Tupac's documentary, my bru,” says Mutant. “He said when he went to jail, everybody in jail was like 'So, Pac what's your orders?' He's like, 'Fuck, what you mean what's my order? I'm just another nigger from the ghetto doing my thing.' These naaiers also want orders from me. 'Isaac, my bru, we need to strengthen this whole coloured nation. What's your orders?'
“It's a scary thing. It's fucking hectic, bru. That's like Jesus and everybody now expects some fucking miracles from you.” He's not happy with this; it's a heavy load. It's a load he doesn't know whether he should pick up at all. “Look, I'm a freak amongst freaks … millions, gazillions. There's one thing I am. I might've been a bad son, a bad dad, even a bad colleague to my brasse [but] I know this for a fact – I am good where hip-hop is concerned. I just have to watch this movie, finish this movie, take this journey out.”
What's clear above everything else is that Isaac Mutant thinks too fucking much and he isn't making enough music. What's staring him in the face is the fact that all the songs he's known for – “Coloured Affairs”, “Sorry Girl” and “None Nwattas” – are the tracks he tossed off without thinking. He needs to get this shit out, but it's all blocked up. It could be because he's under-resourced, or just so fucking nihilistic that it doesn't matter anymore, but Mutant has discovered himself at a very specific place in hip-hop, a place only he could have arrived at, and now he's uncertain whether he wants to be there.
On “Str8 Talk” from 2006's The Unreleased Album, Mutant is the Sméagol of Rap, pointing fingers and laughing. Besides “Sorry Girl”, it's the track he's most Flats-famous for. It reveals his cynical yet loving eye on his own culture. This duality, this distance and closeness surfaces again on “Double Story”, the title track of his collab album with Hemelbesem.
“The idea was basically to make fun of this whole bling thing, while at the same time trying to sound bling or glamorous,” he explains. “The position I'm taking on that nommer is, you know these stalltjie brasse, that fruit-and-veg-on-the-corner type of brasse? I wanna take gam Cape Flats (coloured stereotype) to the world, but dudes in Sweden must still understand what I'm saying. We South Africans, we need to be proud of who the fuck we are. But I love challenges. It actually shouldn't be difficult. I'm a coloured.”
What tracks like “Str8 Talk”, “Double Story”, and even “Rymklets” show off most of all is Mutant's left-field sense of humour, his Lenny Bruce-like ability to make fun of himself while invoking real empathy; he's kak gevaarlik but he's also a sweetheart. One day Mutant wants to kill the world, the next, he just wants to kill himself.
“One moment I'm depressed, one moment I'm trying not to be depressed. I'm always depressed, I'm depressed all the fucking time. Even to the point of suicidal.” If you follow Mutant on Facebook, you'll know he's not kidding; when he gets into a bad space, the suicide jokes and references flow.
“Me and my ex, we lost everything at one stage. All that we had was the clothes that we were wearing. Shit like that happens to me all the time. So at one stage I was like, what the fuck? I'm always depressed right now, sometimes I'm more depressed than other times. I never used to be like that before my moms died. I'm just more emotional after that kak.” He realises that he's going down a black hole here, and he tries to dismiss it.
“All these fucking things in the pot. You realise you've got a lot of emotions you didn't know you had. From an artist's point of view, that kind of emotion is cool because you can tap into that easy, you know, tap into emotion befok. All these fucking classic brasse are all emotional brasse. Ups and downs, the erratic brasse.
“I kind of dig what Kurt Cobain did. I read his suicide note, kak hectic. He said he looked at his daughter's face. It kind of reminded him of who he used to be as an artist, no ego or something of this affect, very untainted and just like love for anybody that's willing to accept that love.
“And he used to be as an artist like that and he's not like that anymore, that's why he killed himself. That kind of brought me back. I want to make an entertaining album, educational music, but like powerful music that fucking touches people.”
Is this why he sticks with it? Is this why Isaac Mutant is in this game? To touch people? Is he not the hard case he makes himself out to be?
“Look now,” he corrects me. “It's like this: I know every dad think his daughter's the shit or son is the shit. Lyric, my daughter, is an MC. She's an artist's fucking dream laaitie. She's kak clever, poes clever. She thinks like me, like out of the box, and I know she's gonna get kak in this society for the way she thinks as well; she's like the Super Saiyan version of me. I see myself in her; the only reason I want to be there for her is like just for guidance, even if I'm a bad guy or a bad dad. Just to let her know there is somebody that understands you. Nobody out of the box, that thinks differently, was there for me.”
He doesn't quite say it, but because Mutant doesn't have access to his daughter, he's left with leaving her messages in his music, and it weighs heavy on his soul. As we're leaving the park jam, Mutant gets into a conversation with some full-on Rastas. “Ike,” they tell him. “We really dig you, man, but you got to keep it real. What's with all the swearing and the perversion?”
“Keep it real?” says Mutant, confused. “What's keeping it real ever got me?”
In the car later, approaching Cape Town after a long silence, he says: “Sorry bra, I'm just depressed at the moment. There's all this other shit going on. I just found out Kim's got another laaitie off me, just now. My laaitie was born last month. I don't know what gender it is, I don't know what its name is. And that kinda fucks with me. I got another laaitie and I don't know their name. And I got a restraining order against me so I can't find out. This is why we had to take another way when we went for those beers. I just can't afford to go mung right now. I'm being a pussy, but it's cool.”
He slumps back in his seat, looking out of the window as we pass the Castle. He changes the subject: “That's one place I've never been.” I tell him I don't believe him. “I'm scared of soldiers, man. Anyway, there's three places I'd like to go in my life: that place, Robben Island and the pyramids.”
We arrive where Isaac is working that night as a stage hand for comedienne Simmi Issacs. But he doesn't make a move, still and contemplating for a second. He wants to clarify something. “The thing about those Rastas is they were drinking. They want me to keep it real, but they were gesyp. I was born into Rasta. My dad and them was all Rastas, so I grew up as one of them. The aunt that is actually a Rasta right now was the one who first took me to The Base. The truth is Rastas are not holy anymore, black people are not black anymore and coloureds are out of excuses.” With that, he gets out the car.
Rolling Stone South Africa — January 2013
Living in a house without electricity
from The disconnect blog
Both my wife and I grew up in normal modern houses hooked to the grid. All of our married life we’ve been hooked to the grid and in a typical apartment or house. Three houses back, counting the one we are currently in, was a long distance from where we are now. We had a friend that gave us access to a couple of cabins in the woods where we would take the family to go and vacation, it was a home away from home. One of the cabins did not have electricity and the other had a couple outlets and a light wired from a nearby barn, we never turned that on when we stayed the night. We loved it, it was very peaceful and quite. We had one of our children born in one of the cabins, it was a wonderful experience. My wife is a powerful woman.
We don’t have exactly zero electricity in our current house, but pretty close to it. Our house is powered by our bodies, wood fuel, some batteries, and in the summer a little propane for cooking. We are both adamant about not hooking back into the grid, we don’t like it – it makes us dependents to a power company with a perpetual monthly bill. We both really don’t want a “smart home” and love our dumb little house – we’re old school. Overall we both quite enjoy being disconnected from the grid and not having our solar system tapped into the house. We may do a little solar on our next home but that isn’t decided. The main thing I’d like is a pump for our water (right now we hand pump and we’ll keep that as an option either way), a few basic lights, and to be able to power things in the home instead of going to the shop. We have a solar system in our shop right now which is elaborated on more fully in the “DIY Solar System Crash Course” writeup. That system is about 100 feet away from our house in our shop with no wires running into the house. We charge things in there and bring them into the house. Primarily a couple lanterns, power tool batteries, a couple laptops, and some Nintendo DS handheld consoles. We are thinking of getting a single 50-100 AH LiFePO4 battery to bring into the house for winter use. It would be nice to be able to skip walking in the cold to the shop for longer periods and to save our power tool batteries for the power tools. Now and then we go up to my parents’ empty double wide trailer home to do a few odds and ends in the summer (laundry, showers, baths, canning). It’s pretty remarkable how loud that thing is compared to our cob and straw bale home. I’ve started this writeup in the trailer, I’m making some bone broth with their propane stove from two sheep recently butchered while catching up on laundry. And it’s insanely loud. The laundry is shaking around, the dryer is humming, and the refrigerator and A/C kicks on regularly. Now that I’m thinking about it mildly it is very distracting…
I’ll describe a little bit on how we function without electricity for anyone interested.
First of all we are not in a very comfortable climate, it gets very cold and very hot. I’ll start with the house temperature regulation since that’s a biggie for many. The house doesn’t do too bad really all things considered. We have had some days over 110 degrees this summer with a lot of days over 100 in a row and the highest it gets in the main part of the house is about 82. Not super comfy but not terrible, feels pretty great when you first come in from the hot day. We’ve been using a fan that runs on our power tool batteries pointed directly at us when we really want it. I did the math and it costs about $0.20 per day of 24h use on the wear of the battery, that’s if you buy the battery at full price which we’ve never done – not too shabby. In the morning on the hottest days we wake up to about 78 degrees on these hot days which shouldn’t last too long. The house really shines in spring and fall, it stays a very comfortable temperature modulating between about 64 and 74 for the bulk of it – roughly 4 or 5 months of the year. When we get the cold or hot snaps that aren’t very long in duration all our thermal mass from our earthen walls and floor really smooths out the temperature. During those times we can easily start using the wood stove to do quick cooking in the morning and evening for breakfast and dinners. As it starts dipping further we’ll keep the fire going a bit longer and add a cooked lunch on the wood stove and merge into keeping the stove going all day, sometimes choked to not use much wood when not cooking. In winter is when we do most our baking, since the stove is going at a high heat most of the day – it’s pretty nice. We also have a thermal mass rocket stove tied to a bench. It is very lovely, when we had a very small cook stove we had the rocket stove going way more often and now that we have a bigger cook stove (Pioneer Princess) we mostly use it during the coldest times of the year. So that pretty much covers the gist of our heating and cooling. It is a pretty basic, cheap, effective, and a fairly sustainable setup. If we were cut off from all inputs we’d be well enough off. We use about 24 gallons of propane a year right now, which will likely go down once we build our summer kitchen with wood cooking options during the hot weather.
For people who wanted to emulate this but wanted to keep it a little cooler and easier heat I’d recommend a basic solar system and a window A/C unit your system can handle. Our shop system could easily run a lower wattage window unit. On the heating side one could add a direct vent propane space heater or two. We had one in our parents double-wide and we added one to our last house before the trailer and it was helpful. In our current house I’d probably put one upstairs and in our sunroom if we added propane heaters. This house would use very little electricity and propane to moderate the temperature compared to any other house we’ve lived in. Also this house would be more comfy if our kids were older, the doors are left open very regularly and we have no curtains which could be drawn to block direct sun. We could have a screen in the upstairs door to leave it open and cool things down faster at night, and so forth. Younger children complicate some things, but life would be dull without them. So glad we were able to bring all these unique characters into our life.
Lets see… What else is common in the electric home. Laundry! Well we cheat pretty bad on that during the summer. We will eventually be using the electricity from our solar system in our shop for the majority of it. But right now we are transgressors using the unholy grid in a house of desecration – the double wide trailer (haha). We lived in that for over a year, it’s pretty lame but it was better than the apartments we lived in and way better than tents. We were grateful to have had it so close to where we were building a house and still grateful to be able to use it some. It’s sitting there empty and someone might as well utilize it and try to keep it from being a raccoon and bear den. We’ve had to battle rats and mice, not a lot of fun. If one of my siblings moved in we’d likely get the laundry situation down at our homestead going asap. But when there is an easy solution sitting around it’s easy to lower that as a priority. I’ve tested our system out and it works well, our solar system will run the old Maytag wringer-washer we have when the time comes. We hope to get a cistern tied to our shop/barn for laundry and a summer shower and that will solve the problems we’ll have if/when someone takes over the trailer. When the trailer is winterized we do laundry in a trough with spring water. It works well enough. It’s a lot more work though and my wife does most of it. The kids and I help in waves and I think she really appreciates it. We will all love the old Maytag washer once that’s set up in the shop. We do baths in the winter by heating water on our stove and dumping it in the tub. We also have a camp battery powered sprayer for those who want to shower. It can be dropped in a pot of warm water and sprayed out into the tub for showering.
Hmmm, what else did we use a lot of when we had electricity. Oh ya, lighting! So we tried to go with the old oil lamp system in the beginning and we loved it! But the glass covers on the top are very fragile, they keep breaking with kids around. One of our kids even tipped one over and started a fire – he was terrified of oil lamps for about a year after that. It wasn’t a big deal, I just smothered it with a blanket or towel or something… It was such a minor thing in my mind I forgot what was used to put it out. He’s comfortable with them now but we don’t use them often because they just keep breaking. Kids are wild destructive forces of nature, and I love ‘em. So for now we are mostly using rechargeable lanterns and rechargeable light bulbs. We have tried about 6 or so different brands and models of things and only one has stood out as pretty great. Maybe I’ll look it up again and share the link. Some have died super quickly and some are still working but have flaws of some sort or another. I’d like to go back to oil when the kids are more matured. The oil lantern light is so soft and comfortable on the eyes. We’ll probably continue with a a couple LED lanterns just for the higher lumens. For making dinner and other things it’s nice to have a burst of brighter light which the oil lamps don’t put out. My wife and I also use our e-Readers quite a bit at night to use the restroom or get a drink and such. Those things are great, we both have the Kobo Clara which lasts for over 2 weeks of night light and reading books. We also just go to bed with the sun. In the winter Mama will read longer into the evening with the kids and sometimes play multiplayer Nintendo DS games with them in bed, and in the summer they are tired and go to sleep quickly. It works out pretty swell, we truly don’t miss all that obnoxious lighting of the typical city and city home.
Welp, that covers the gist of our electricity in life in the home. We grind wheat with a manual grinder. We might get a lower powered electric one and grind wheat in the shop at some point. The mill we are thinking of is on back order. We make toast on the stove top. We don’t refrigerate anything, instead we can, ferment, and eat things fresh from the garden – we also reboil soups and stuff daily to “reset” them which is very easy in winter. We also use a cooler behind the house in the shade which works as a refrigerator for parts of spring and fall, and in the dead of winter our sunroom is a pretty cool temperature. We really have limited power so there are a lot of appliances we don’t have and will never have – and that’s great. We have to think before buying something electricity based because we literally can’t plug anything into the house and in the shop we have limited power (right now we can do about 700-800 watts for long durations). If we bought a 3,000 watt or higher something or other we just couldn’t even run it at all, and we will live fine without it.
So there you have it. A family living in the modern world choosing to ditch electricity in the home for the most part. Maybe not as hardcore as the Amish, but more than the average off-grid type family. it’s not as primitive as it could be, but far from the typical grid tied house. And we love it.
Have a great one!
Additional resources:
The rechargeable LED lantern we like is the 1500 Lumen model from the brand Consciot. It has a good range of brightness level with a warm light setting that we like. It also doubles as a USB charging device (never used this feature so I can't comment on it), the battery in it lasts longer between charges than any other rechargeable light we've tried. It has held up well for two years now with many other brands dying before that over the years. This one is easy to find on many websites to purchase, do a web search for more details. Cost is roughly $40 each in 2026. We bought two from another brand that cost about $20 each at the same time and both of them are broken already. This brand has held up to the rough handling by children so far.
choices
from hypocritepoet
Made every day.
from 
TRAILER PARK LIFE
We all dream of America
from 
Roscoe's Quick Notes
Friday's MLB game of choice has my Texas Rangers playing the Seattle Mariners in the first game of a four-game series. This is the game and series I originally thought would start yesterday. Duh! Tonight”s game is scheduled to start at 7:05 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.
And the adventure continues.
Mightier than the Keyboard
from 
Ennui Vagaries
Image: “Mightier Than the Keyboard?” handwritten on a piece of paper with a fountain pen. Photo by: Unattributed, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
When I started using Fountain Pens last year, I noted that there was something different about the quality of my writing. It seemed to have a different quality to it. At first, I couldn't figure out the reason for it. But as I kept writing I meditated on the subject. As I turned the idea around in my mind for a while, I came up with a few thoughts seemed to explain what I was both feeling and experiencing.
My Personal Reasoning
The first thought that came to my mind was that I had approached fountain pens from a different perspective than I had other writing instruments. I had started using them as a hobby, as a way to improve my penmanship. The point wasn't to write down the thoughts in my mind, but instead of work on better controlling the muscles in my arm and wrist.
I wanted to produce text that looked beautiful, no matter what the contents were. I was working from a workbook: The Lost Art of Handwriting by Brenna Jordan, to be exact. In the book she covers a lot of letter forms, variations, and suggests lots of practice sentences. I loved it. It required a fair amount of concentration to get some of the letter forms right, but the practice was exactly what I wanted.
However, after a while, my mind started telling me I needed to do something else. I needed to write something of substance. Something that had meaning, if only for me personally. That's when I started a journal.
Now I had tried to keep journals before, on my computer, in a note-taking application. I had taken to the idea of having a “second brain”, but not because I was sold on PKM or anything like that. My second brain experience came from a coworker from many years ago. He used to keep a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) with a ton of notes on it. Those notes were chock-full of obscure, and unusual things that we encountered working on computer systems. He carried it everywhere. We referred to it whenever we ran into a problem that seemed like something he might have seen, but couldn't recall how to resolve the issue.
I can't even being to count the number of times he found either the exact information we needed, or information that assisted us in further diagnosing an issue in his PDA. We started referring to that device as his second brain.
Anyway, while PDA's had gone by the wayside, I had taken to the idea of creating a “second brain” for myself. Saving information that I thought might be useful in the future. And, it had seemed to me, that adding a journal full of notes and ideas made sense for my second brain. Only, it had never worked. I would add my journal entries to it for weeks or even a few months, and eventually stop.
And, to make things worse, the journal entries were (mostly) superficial. The entries really only related to other things I had been obsessing over, generally about things that I had already saved in the app. There wasn't the quality of ingenuity, uniqueness, or personal observation that I had wanted to capture.
However, when I started writing a journal on paper, in a notebook, all the unique, personal observations started coming out. All the things that I had wanted to accomplish in digital form were there, in analog, on sheets of paper in ink.
Why? In my mind I found three reasons:
- I was cut off from the rest of the information in my second brain. Sure, I could have picked up my phone, or gone to my PC to access it, but I didn't.
- Handwriting is a slower process. It isn't like typing in that in a few swishes of your fingers and twenty or thirty words appear on the screen in a matter of a few seconds. Writing twenty or thirty words required more focus, more attention, more effort.
- Intentionality: I had more intent in the words that I put on the page. There wasn't the easy edits to correct the words on the page the way there was with a computer. Sure, I could always cross words out, and I did that at times, but the more you have to cross out and change on the page, the more the page starts looking messier and more difficult to read. And I had initially started writing with fountain pens to produce cleaner, nicer lettering and therefore pages.
Over time, I wondered if there was anything to back up my hypothesis about why handwriting was different from typing on the computer.
Testing My Theory
So, after seeing a video from Sbrebrown: The Benefits of Taking Handwritten Notes vs Digital Notes I decided to pose the question on the Fediverse: [ Question] Study of note-taking with Pens vs. Laptops. The subject is interesting, and has been attracting a lot of attention over the last decade or so. The question that has been examined is: do students that take handwritten notes do better than students who type notes on a laptop.
In a meta analysis Typed Versus Handwritten Lecture Notes and College Student Achievement: A Meta-Analysis, researchers examined twenty-four studies that had been conducted over the last hundred years. They concluded that the studies indicated that there is a correlation between handwritten versus typed notes. Note, the interesting part here is that the study includes several papers that were not conducted in an academic setting as there wouldn't have been typewriters in a classroom.
In another paper, The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard: Advantages of Longhand Over Laptop Note Taking researchers concluded from four studies that students did worse on conceptual questions because they were not processing information as deeply. Instead, they were mostly transcribing the lecture without thinking about it deeply.
However, there have been some publications that take the opposite position: Don’t Ditch the Laptop Just Yet: Replication Finds No Immediate Advantage to Writing Notes by Hand. While the most deeply analytical article is one that I just barely grasp at the surface level: The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing—Who Wins the Battle?, which goes so far as to have conducted neuroimaging studies of the brain while writing and typing:
Recent neuroimaging studies including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and positron emission tomography (PET) have provided insights into the neural mechanisms that underlie these two forms of written expression.
And the results were quite interesting (quoting the abstract):
Results: Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing. Typing engages fewer neural circuits, resulting in more passive cognitive engagement. Despite the advantages of typing in terms of speed and convenience, handwriting remains an important tool for learning and memory retention, particularly in educational contexts.
My Takeaway
To me, the neuroscience study reinforces the second and third thoughts that I had:
- Handwriting is a slower process. It isn't like typing in that in a few swishes of your fingers and twenty or thirty words appear on the screen in a matter of a few seconds. Writing twenty or thirty words required more focus, more attention, more effort.
- Intentionality: I had more intent in the words that I put on the page. […]
The idea that “Handwriting activates a broader network of brain regions involved in motor, sensory, and cognitive processing.” would seem to be in alignment with those thoughts. There is a whole different level of thought that is going into writing in a notebook – be it with a ballpoint or a fountain pen.
But, that doesn't mean that this is settled science. In fact, science is rarely settled on finding a single conclusion. Instead, the thoughts and understanding that emerge from science tend to track with the more predominant studies of the time, however there is always room for those findings to be challenged. This can be seen in the Don't Ditch the Laptop Just Yet article referenced above.
The thing that I would note about most of these studies is they are focused on taking notes in an academic setting: listening to a lecture and trying to capture the essence of what is being said. That, I think, is the bounding point to keep in mind. Scientists could find there are different considerations in different settings, and when the objective is different. For example: writing a letter, a poem, or a novel could well be sufficiently different from taking notes to warrant further study.
As for the first item on my list? I don't think this is something that really relates to the topic scientifically. It's a matter of how I have shaped myself, the habits that I have developed over the years since I decided to start building my “second brain.” It took conscious effort on my behalf to put myself in a position where I wouldn't access all the information that I had compiled. I decided that it would be easy to get too distracted from the act of writing itself.
And that's where I think I'll conclude this: I lean towards the idea that writing with a fountain pen is fundamentally different from typing based on the neuroscience, until proven otherwise.
Categories: #Editorials Tags: #FountainPens, #typing, #notes, #science, #neuroscience, License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.
The Heart of Ham Radio
from 00692285
Around eight years ago I thought it would be funny to become a licensed ham-radio operator. For those who don’t know, ham radio is a hobby that revolves around radio communications. I was always fascinated by radio and I was a romantic about the idea of talking to people over the radio. The process wasn’t too hard. I learned some basic electronics and regulations around radio communications. I took a test and submitted it to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and a few weeks later I was a federally-recognized radio-operator with a callsign and was permitted to transmit on a small corner of the radio spectrum. The technology was fun to learn and operate but frankly I found the company among other US hams problematic. The majority of conversations in ham radio are totally benign—just ham radio operators talking about ham radio on their radios. But if you listen long enough, the airwaves can be home to the type of talk common among conservative and libertarian voices. There were vocal opinions about the liberal forces of society encroaching upon the conservative way of life, antagonistic rhetoric toward big government, and the “liberal agenda” it was imposing on Americans.
I was scandalized by the culture when I first started dabbling in ham radio, partly because I’d never actually interacted with people outside my east-coast liberal bubble. In those days, I was a pretty mainstream liberal progressive type. I felt uncomfortable taking part in a hobby that was home to so many people I disagreed with culturally and politically. On one occasion, I heard two guys casually talking about how they felt threatened by the presence of a young black man at a fast food establishment and how they would have “defended themselves” if he had tried anything. There was open talk about gun rights at a time when anti-gun sentiment in my corner of America was riding high. I liked the hobby fine and I didn’t want to leave it because of these people so I tried to be the change I wanted to see in ham radio. I attended radio club meetings and tried to make ham radio visible to a younger, more like-minded segment of the population. I posted on local reddit forums to try to spread the word about ham radio in an effort to bring in a younger, possibly more progressive crowd. Unfortunately I found that among my peers, there was very little interest in radio communications let alone any desire to expose themselves to a culture they found distasteful. The only young people I could find that were interested in the hobby were preppers, off-roaders, and gun-people—exactly the people I was trying to get away from.
Eventually, l learned to “spin the dial”—a ham radio term for moving to a different frequency if you don’t like what you hear. I moved away from talking to people on the radio to the more fun aspect of building and tinkering with radios and antennas and contesting. I retreated from trying to singlehandedly change the culture of ham radio and instead focused on what I liked about ham radio. During this time I decided to challenge myself by getting into what’s called SOTA (Summits on the Air.) Summits on the air is a form of radio contesting where radio operators set up a station in remote places (usually summits of mountains) and try to establish as many contacts as they can from these places. It involves building a portable station that can operate completely off-grid. It’s a fun and rewarding experience to reach a designated spot on a map and transmit from that spot. After a few of these “activations” as they’re called I realized that I wasn’t just making contacts for fun. I was learning to be a fully self-sustaining unit of my own. Everything needed to send a signal from a remote area needed to fit inside a backpack that I could carry. If I forgot a critical component, the activation would fail. I was proud of my ability to be able to make a fully operational radio station in the wilderness free from the grid.
Early in my radio career I remember driving around my hometown and looking at all the antenna towers that need to be built in order for us to communicate over the phone. I realized early on that we were all using radio, but we were all relying on existing infrastructure to do so and we pay a premium to do so. Not to say that the money we pay for this infrastructure isn’t worth it. Cellphone technology is a marvel of modern communications and has enabled so much of our modern way of life. Still, I hated the idea of being totally and utterly dependent on it. I hated the idea that in the (unlikely) scenario that if all this infrastructure were to fail, our modern methods of communications would be completely lost. Over time I came to see the ability to communicate using radio as a form of self-reliance. I was taking back my ability to use wireless communication back from the government and corporate power. This in turn led me to understand why ham radio was popular with a segment of the population that values self reliance over government reliance. A lot of work goes into making a contact over the radio. Individuals in ham radio go to great lengths and build extraordinary things to simply establish a contact with someone new. Beneath the contesting, long-winded conversations known as “rag-chews”, the banal weather reports, and daily “nets” is the heart of ham radio: The ability to communicate wirelessly when everything else fails.
Societal cooperation has obviously allowed us to do a great many things, and we are all better off working together. So what if we use cell phone networks and never question our reliance on the network? So long as everyone is paying their bills, and relying on the government and the cellphone companies for the network, then everything is fine. Until it’s not. It doesn’t happen often these days, but every so often it’s ad hoc networks of amateur radio operators that are best able to respond when telecom networks fail.
My involvement in amateur radio didn’t make me into a commando, but it did open my eyes to the many ways I’d been utterly dependent on systems that had the potential to fail. Everywhere I looked I saw a system of dependencies. I had seen all the ways I and many people around me had taken for granted these systems—food systems, communication systems, healthcare systems, etc. The worst part was that many of these systems didn’t always have my interests in mind. Their interest was in revenue generation or political power. We take so very much for granted in this country to the point where we’ve lost the ability to fathom what it would be like to live without these dependencies. We assume that nothing so bad could ever happen to us where we would need to learn to navigate with map and compass because we just assume that Google Maps and all the satellites and software that make it happen will always work. We assume that we’ll never have to defend ourselves because we believe a cop will always be there to help us when we’re in danger.
Even as I evolved spiritually, I came to see dependency and community in new ways. To be a person of faith is to be dependent on a power greater than yourself. But that dependency does not mean passivity. The work of any faith begins with the individual—the prayers and meditations one performs alone, the discipline and the willingness to try something new and the accountability no one else can carry for you. The same rule applies: you have to help yourself so that you can help others. A broken vessel cannot hold water.
I honestly don’t know what I am now politically. All I can say is that I’m not what I was when I first started my journey into ham radio. To understand ham radio is to understand my political journey over the last ten years.
Some people call this paranoia. Some people outright believe it’s good to be entirely dependent on systems. They don’t see any issue with being entirely dependent on the government or on corporations for basic things. They actually believe that we should be more dependent on the government. They believe we should increase the size and scope of the government’s reach further into our lives. Instead of fostering an ability to live without these dependencies, some people look for ways to undermine those abilities. I’m not against being dependent on systems, I’m very much a creature of dependency (looking at you, Costco), but I am against not nurturing our individual abilities to help ourselves so that we can help others. We should all be trying to foster some sort of individual ability within ourselves so that we can help our immediate communities, our family, our towns, our schools, not politicians in a bureaucracy in Washington DC or some Silicon Valley corporation that only seeks to enrich themselves.
I don’t advocate for individualism. We have enough of that in the US and it has been poisonous to our sense of community. What I do advocate for is fostering and training our abilities to be able to live without these systems-level dependencies so that we can take care of our neighbors when these safety-nets fail. When the cell phone networks in North Carolina went down, following a hurricane in 2024, it was a loose community of Amateur radio operators who came together to help getting messages in and out of the immediate disaster zone. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked. Verizon and AT&T eventually came, but it was people who took the time to learn to communicate without the cellphone network that were able to help their community. It was an ad-hoc network of individuals who were best able to help. The federal government isn’t what makes America great. It’s the individuals and talents that form communities that make America great.
I’m close to needing to renew my radio license which means it will have been ten years since I first started transmitting. I still denounce extremist and inflammatory voices that are thankfully a minority on the airwaves. I am however, much more sympathetic to the larger philosophical view of self-reliance and resistance to big government. Ham radio taught me self reliance for the ultimate goal of being able to contribute to society instead of just taking for granted all that it gave me. It’s about empowering yourself and being accountable for the ultimate purpose of serving your community.
Change
from hypocritepoet
it comes like it or not
Different points of view.
Holy
from An Open Letter
Today I worked out with J at the new gym And I talked to two new people, they were both gorgeous women, and the second one even called to us in the parking lot and we joked around for a bit before she asked for our Instagram. I just feel a big sense of revitalized hope of meeting people, this feels like the ideal third place. I also just got back home from playing Catan with friends, and also just talking for a while. I feel really good and I’m happy with this life.