Composer Dimitri Voudouris, the director of the inaugural Unyazi electronic music festival, burns with an almost religious fire.
“Remove the cotton wool from your ears and come and wash your eyes,” he says of the festival that will throw musicians, teachers and sonic scientists from 17 countries together with African musicians who are working in the field.
The festival is the first of its kind on the continent and is now into its second day at Wits University in Johannesburg. It ends on Sunday.
But be warned, don’t think you’ll be celebrating the “joy of jazz”. This music will have been “remade into a shifting, open lattice on which new ideas can hang, or through which they can pass and interweave”, according to one definition of electronic music by musician and writer David Toop.
Africa is generally not considered to have produced electronic music pioneers, yet the famous Egyptian composer, Halim el-Dabh, who plays on Friday night, created one of the first electronic works in 1944, predating the French musique concrète school by a number of years. Like Bela Bartók’s, his work draws on his field research into traditional music, in his case from North Africa and Ethiopia. He has explored both electronic and folk instruments such as the Egyptian clay drum, the darabukha. He will perform the love story Leiyla and the Poet: Electronic Drama No 1, in which the speakers will play the part of the prophet Mohammed and his second wife Leiyla. There will also be trampoline artists and gymnasts.
In selecting the artists, Voudouris says, he has tried to give people a varied programme “so they don’t get bored with the same thing”.
“It’s very important to give the people who attend the festival an idea of what electronic music is about. To understand it you have to see and hear it live. We’re trying to address jazz and work out where it should be moving internationally. Zim Ngqawana will be deconstructing jazz. It’s his first experience with electronic music,” he says.
Pops Mohamed has also been booked and will be processing the mbira and kora with live reverb.
Another highlight of the festival will be American artist Pauline Oliveros, the groundbreaking modular synthesis-based sound pioneer. Oliveros will make use of indigenous instruments that are processed by her Expanded Instrument System and then mixed live for eight speakers.
Francisco Lopez from Spain also promises to be a high point. The audience will be blindfolded and taken on a “50-minute journey through huge environmental soundfields of music”.
Workshops will be conducted by Blake Tyson, Oliveros, Lopez, Brendon Bussy and Luc Houtkamp who, with local composers and performers, will develop a local ensemble over four days that will perform live on the last day of the festival.
Aryan Kaganof, one of South Africa’s most exciting filmmakers, has worked closely with electronic musicians in many of his films, some of which will be screened at the festival.
The Listening Room is where performances of works for premixed tape will be held.
One more thing; unyazi means lightning.