Friday night :Andrew Kay
My Friday night was so good it actually started the night before. Coming at the tail end of a cathartic and sleep-deprived three- day bender, my Friday night was perhaps a little tame in comparison with the previous two nights. If this column had been titled Wednesday to Friday night, you would definitely have been in for the salacious story of sex `n’ drugs `n’ rock `n’ roll that you might expect from one such as me.
However, at the risk of alienating you, gentle reader, and putting myself out of a job, I shall contain my Friday Night story to the strictly legal.
I am at the sound studio at the Wits School of Music (which is strangely known as the `E’ Lab). I am here to listen to the work of slamming jungle duo Mobius Trip, who’ve just completed their debut CD and are looking for a deal with one of the top dance labels overseas. Jonathan Crossley, the well-known and prodigious graduate from the Wits School of Music, is talking me through the album track by track.
This is a band from whom you will definitely be hearing in the months to come. Cutting edge re-compressed break beats with killer bass lines, ambient noise and sampled avant- garde classical piano from the work of Helmut Jasbar coupled with state-of-the-art production techniques, will make this CD a must for jungle enthusiasts and techno- freaks.
After this, it’s off to my mobilically- challenged mate’s house, MC Sparky, to give him a lift to Ciro Pizza and Pasta where he spends his Friday night (and four other nights of the week) in the quietly humming mode of constantly moving and all-seeing waiter. I come, of course, seeking knowledge from the wise ones as to the secrets of the ancient art of pizza making. Just how is it that some places make a mediocre pizza, and others, like Ciro’s, seem to effortlessly and consistently produce the kind of pizzas that would tempt even the most hard-core of mung- bean and lentil-inspired health food fanatics to gorge themselves on the digestively incorrect delights of a pizza?
“The secret of a good pizza is in the base. If you don’t have a good base you can put gold on it and you’d still have a shite pizza,” says Umberto Santos, the moutachioed proprietor and bike-riding owner of the restaurant. And what is the secret to being a good waiter, I enquire of Sparky? “You’ve got to be omni-attentive to the myriad network of cosmic vibrations around you, and achieve, my son, perfectly rectifiable timing,” he says mystically, while swishing past on his way to deliver a Coke, on feet that barely touch the floor.
Finally I get to Carfax to catch Cape Town beatmeisters OHM (formerly Transsky and strangely billed as such) performing their laudable set of drum `n’ bass-inspired songs. All the local small time luminaries are here, from Chris Chameleon of Boo! to Paul Rieckert of Battery 9 to the odd award-winning video director whose name I forget. Any self- respecting bender has to see the sun rise over Boksburg, and I must confess I am filled with a warm sense of well-being and hope for the Beloved Country as I finally collapse into the gentle arms of slumber.
Andrew Kay is a freelance writer who is studying music at Wits