What has happened to South Africa’s `alternative Afrikaners’? Well, some of them are in avant-rock groups, experimenting with outlandish sounds and cutting-edge technology
Dror Eyal
My teenage girlhood ended one sunny February when I was sent to an all-boys high school. I remained a boy and it was years later before I learned about the morning rituals of womanhood. By then it didn’t have much to do with girlhood, but with The Mud Ensemble; a musical collective of aural alchemists, artists, and occasional fetishists fronted by a woman called Juliana Venter.
An uncompromising modern diva, Juliana has the kind of vocal range that most singers only dream of. One minute gorgeously lyrical, then suddenly the very structure collapses and the song is flung in your face. Erupting in a volley of screams, while the seven members that make up the ensemble move through subversive rhythms, yells, and exclamations of delight. It’s as if you’re treated to a secret version of every pop song you’ve ever heard. This is the new breed of musicians; to be filed under “New Edge Music”.
In the Eighties it was bands like Koos, The Kalahari Surfers and the whole alternatiewe Afrikaner movement that was bent on negation, driven by apartheid and a delight in shock tactics. They were the cultural explosions that cleared the ground, and because they rebelled against politics, led people to confuse politics with art.
But it is now 1997. Apartheid is supposedly gone and the avant-garde faces the questions of what to make of the new sense of freedom and a new sense of limits. It seems that anything is permissible; everything is possible. It seems that any voice can find a niche audience to talk back to it.
Who exactly do you rebel against? What are the new taboos? Avant-garde bands like the Mud Ensemble become more a matter of private hopes and fears than of consciously shared social facts; less a message than an argument.
Yes, no, yes, no, well maybe. But Venter sings about women, and the possibilities of feminism. Not the feminism of the Seventies but the fluidity and pain of womanhood. It is no longer a matter of wanting to be equal, but the embracing of the feminine. Wanting to be female. The celebration of girlhood and all its everyday mundanities. Her voice, her looks, her posture say: “Look, this is ordinary life. You didn’t think it was worth singing about.” But the voice conveys such a sense of hate, terror and outrage that suddenly the everyday becomes interesting.
It is also the subversion of the everyday as Live Jimi Presley lay down their angle- grinders and scrapyard percussion; while Marc Presley launches into Anthem, a song about realising that you have worked all your life and have nothing to show for it. The angle-grinders start up, showering sparks into the crowd. Suddenly it’s not that boring or sad. It’s the New Edge.
It’s an edge that slices microthin as Somerfaan calls a girlfriend from a phone- booth in hell. It’s Breinskade playing to a nearly empty Abalarde Sanction, their industrial sounds emanating from a Dat recording, while band members dismember various household appliances onstage. It’s Seven Head Scream flirting with anonymity, while the slide on the wall proclaims: “I am a girl; you are a boy.”
Backed up with an abrasive sound that will never be subsumed into mundanity, the New Edge contrasts the material with the medium, creating a kind of tension. And it is this tension that gives rise to the the new avant-garde. It’s Fingerhead, Antenna Flavour Consultant, Bondage Chess and Sparky’s Magic Piano refusing to walk the straight and narrow, subverting the everyday.
But sometimes out on the periphery nobody wants to hear you scream.