Some things are worth waiting for.
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Four kids: two from the streets of Spruitview and two from the streets of Soweto. A jazz drummer, a session bassist and two aspiring guitarists whose love for icons such as Ray Phiri and Masike Mohapi sat neatly beside a love of Thurston Moore and Jimi Hendrix.
They dumbfounded audiences and politicised rock ‘n roll — and then there was the music. A giant psychedelic morass, grounded in dub, amplified by punk, thrashed by metal and fuelled by the musical heritage of a country at the southern tip of Africa.
Too challenging to easily understand, too bombastic to ignore, the BLK JKS demanded attention, but the majority of South Africans remained blissfully unaware.
For the most part the BLK JKS were like a cultural oddity, which if ignored for long enough, would quietly disappear. The BLK JKS’s story could have ended there, like so many before them, but they got out, got noticed and got signed.
Now, courtesy of the label Secretly Canadian, we have the debut album, After Robots, which is going to take South African music to places it’s never been before. And I’m not the only one who thinks so.
When I was tweeting about how incredible I thought the album was, Cape Town musician Righard Kapp, who has released one of our country’s finest album’s this year, replied to me, saying: “The importance of After Robots to South African music is monumental.”
The point was not lost on guitarist Mpumi Mcata: “I took a step back after we had done the album and I thought to myself that it doesn’t matter what people think of the music, because it’s an important cultural moment just because of its existence.”
As I sit across from him at Richmond’s Bohemian drinking hole, I think to myself that he is being awfully coy. He is, after all, talking about an album that could turn out to be Africa’s answer to Dark Side of the Moon.
“It felt like an exorcism for us,” says Mcata. “It’s like a lucid dream and it’s great to see it manifested.”
“We came from our little practise room in Spruitview and we were in the middle of the snow, in some little studio, in a very small town in Middle America and we got to take all the ideas we have had over the past four years and make a record,” says bassist Molefi Makananise.
“You look back at the work and you are like, yeah!” says drummer Tshepang Ramoba with a huge grin, visible behind his dreadlocks.
“It felt good, man,” says guitarist and singer Linda Buthelezi, with a smile. “All that hard work paid off.”
“There were a lot of people willing us on in the studio,” says Mcata. “All the people that have played a part in our development, the people that dragged us out of our bedrooms.”
At the helm in the studio was The Secret Machine’s Brandon Curtis, with whom the band had worked with on their Mystery EP, a magnificent companion to the new album and an early indicator of the direction the BLK JKS were heading.
Makananise says that when the band first met Curtis at the famed Electric Lady studios in New York, they approached the weekend recording session as a collaboration. “We liked each other,” he says, “and then came this album and it felt like an unfinished story that we had to complete.”
And thank the gods they did complete it, because After Robots is a masterpiece of blistering guitar, psychedelic rhythms and moody, almost gothic, vocals. So the BLK JKS have a mesmerising debut album and a string of independent releases preceding it. They have a wicked experimental nature that makes their live shows incendiary.
They have a New York-based manager, Knox Robinson, who is intent on taking their music to the masses, and they have a record deal with one of the hippest independent labels in the United States at the moment, sharing a stable with Magnolia Electric Co, Antony and the Johnsons and I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness.
“It’s an interesting time and definitely new territory for the BLK JKS,” says Mcata. “We feel like there is a lot behind us and we felt supported going into the recording of the album, which was very different for us, having been DIY until that point.”
When I ask the band if they ever get a sense that they may be kicking down doors for other South African bands to walk through, Buthelezi pipes up: “Personally, we’ve had to kick down several doors for ourselves. As for who put them back up, I don’t know, man.”
The band members laugh. “Maybe we should do away with the guy who keeps putting the doors back up,” says Makananise.
What the BLK JKS have shown South Africa’s artists is that you can stick to your guns and your ideals and make the music you want without compromise. Then throw in an international label and a world tour for good measure.
This is what the future holds: September to November in the US and Europe, January in Australia and February and March in Asia.
“Touring, touring, touring,” says Mcata. “We’re getting to know the world we live in. Sometimes the travelling gets crazy. You wake up and ask yourself: ‘Is this a plane or a train?'”
“If the Rolling Stones and the Beatles could do it, then why can’t we?” asks Makananise.
Who can argue with that?