poison
CD of the week: Shaun de Waal
One of the strangest and most interesting CDs of South African origin you are likely to hear this year -or any other – is dURBAN NOISE and scraps WORKS. On it, University of Natal composer Jurgen Bruninger, draws together 47 Durban players and any number of found sounds into a complex musical collage.
His chief collaborator is poet Ari Sitas.”My lyrics/poems were seen by Jurgen as part of the `noise’ that was happening in Durban from the late Eighties to the early Nineties,” says Sitas. Scattered thorough the ever- changing sonic landscape, these urgent, edgy utterances are treated like musique concrte. They are, as Sitas says, “given the treatment – their seriousness dispersed, undermined, changed, and their humour perverted and enhanced”.
Alongside interwoven bursts of practically every kind of music presently available to one’s ears – free jazz, hip-hop, rap, modern classical avant-garde -there are the noises of a city and its inhabitants, whether human or insect, tourist guide or fruit-bat. Bruninger calls it “a celebration of, and a blast (an affectionate stab?) at Durban”.
The present meets the past and Africa meets Europe with an exhilarating crash. Among the 47 musicians, Monde “Lex” Futshane provides acoustic bass, while Matthew Brubeck plays violincello; Pedro Espi-Sanches is to be heard on jew’s harp and xizambi, while Bruninger samples everything from nyanga panpipes to mbira.
Bruninger engineers a series of fertile collisions: muzak is added to the buzz of a marketplace; the sound of house alarms mutate into the noises of insects; Deepak Ram’s north Indian reed instrument, the bansuri, is laid over the rhythm of the toyi- toyi.
The project, says Bruninger, takes as its subject “Durban’s urban musics, accents, ambiences, sounds; history, memory, tradition, `the other’; ambiguous identities, hybridisation of cultures, manipulation of reality …”
Bruninger, who has composed film music for The Lawnmower Man and dance dramas like Ahimsa-Ubuntu, is also “a facilitator of popular recording in KwaZulu-Natal through the Culture and Working Life Project” or, as Sitas puts it, ” a selfless recorder, producer, documenter of a lot of the grassroots musical energy that was happening all around us”. On dURBANNOISEand scraps WORKS, Bruninger’s disparate skills and interests come triumphantly together.
In case you can’t find the CD in your local CDshop (and its absence is, unfortunately, a likelihood, though it should be available at branches of Musica, through Nebula BosRecords), dURBANNOISEis distributed by GSEClaremont Records, PO Box 250, Newlands, 7725, South Africa; tel: (021) 686 6915 or fax: (021) 686 6043. Otherwise, try the website at .