Spooky Attraction from a Distance. That’s the name of the band. In a way, that sums up my relationship with one half of it, Juliana Venter. It’s easy to be overwhelmed when you first see and hear her sing. And easy to feel — even during a decade of no contact — a strange longing for the music she helped to make.
My first encounter came in the late 1990s on a typically cold, unforgiving Grahamstown Festival night. She and her then-partner, Marcel van Heerden, and their band Mud Ensemble were playing.
I recall them performing Eyeless in a Spaza that night. Van Heerden’s slow drawl of the lyrics eventually squiggled into Juliana’s and the band’s more frenetic shrieks.
“It was a hectic time in Johannesburg back then,” she tells me when we eventually sit down face to face and start talking back towards those days. She is here to promote Spooky Attraction from a Distance’s debut album Sunflower Sutra as well as a belated compilation of Mud Ensemble tracks titled 1993-1999.
“I survived, but many didn’t. I mean, when the crack thing hit Jo’burg — friends, houses, wives, cars disappeared. You don’t come out unscathed. The Germans say you have a beschädigte Dach — damaged roof — after things like that.”
A new voice
Germany is where Juliana has just come from — she has lived abroad for a decade, first in London, then in Berlin, where she married the father of her seven-year old, Anouk, who is playing inside and outside of the restaurant where we are having brunch.
“In the UK I learnt that I was very protected working in a group like Mud Ensemble. It’s your country, you’re singing about your themes, your place — your power lay in singing about things you knew. To then move to London was a shock. I tried to change, move into pop. I won’t say it was a waste of time, but I knew I had to find my voice again. But that’s hard in London, where things are fleeting, about what’s cool now, about fashion.”
This process continued for a while, until she started building that new voice. She hooked up with Ramsay McKay (who co-wrote some of the songs on Sunflower Sutra), ex-frontman of legendary South African psych-rock pioneers Freedom’s Children. The music started inching back. Then she moved to Germany, where she found another kindred spirit, Josef Suchy, her bandmate in Spooky, a guitarist and German neu musik pioneer.
“Moving to Germany continued this feeling of loss I had. I needed a home, a place to call my own, where I felt welcome. I don’t think I ever felt welcome over the past 10 years.”
Juliana as Juliana
She laughs at saying this, but it’s obvious that it’s true. Slowly a new identity emerged, Juliana as Juliana, not just as part of a band, or a specific country.
“I have a love/hate relationship with Europe, with Berlin now. At moments I love it, but it will never be home. This language I hated so much — Afrikaans — the language of apartheid: I missed it. It’s funny how you realise the value of home only when you leave home. When I left I thought fuck this place, fuck these people! I was angry.”
That sense of longing runs like a warm, throbbing seam throughout the Spooky album. The music is modern and rich in invention: it’s made in Europe, without a doubt. But often her voice and lyrics — especially when doing the Afrikaans poem by Johan van Wyk on White Ant — lights a small fire in the song around which you can warm your hands.
That is the delicate tension that holds your hand throughout the album.
Spooky’s allure is slower than that of Mud Ensemble. Though her voice can be enormously powerful, Sunflower Sutra is not an album on which she shows off.
Getting her voice back
“It’s a result of my environment,” she explains. “In my flat in Germany I couldn’t scream like I used to in Mud Ensemble. You have to be quiet!
“Sound is the most important thing. That’s why it was so good to work with Josef, because he’s not a singer. The sound you make is as important as the text, because the sound is what will differentiate you from everyone else. You have to try to be inventive. The same goes for using your voice. I think I lost a little bit of that in Mud Ensemble, and that I’m now on the road to getting it back.”
You only have to listen to track four, where she sings a Rilke poem Ende des herbstes (End of Autumn) along a delicate harp composition that would, if played inside a cathedral, possibly cause spontaneous levitations.
Mud Ensemble 1993 — 1999 is, as the title suggests, a document from the past (the band broke up in 1999, and there is no plan to reform), rather than a letter to the future, as Sunflower Sutra is.
Yet without it we would have been short of a vital chapter from the 1990s underground scene, as no other recordings have ever been released. Eyeless in a Spaza is present, so too their rendering of the Sylvia Plath poem The Hermit. Search for it on YouTube, there’s a recording of this song performed live, dating from 1997.
In it Juliana wears a white suit covered in nails, her hair is red like old flames, and she sings a hole through which your evening could disappear into.
Swallowed by the city
Mud Ensemble’s lyrics contain the words of two other lost masters: the brilliant Johan van Wyk (still alive, but almost invisible on the literary scene these days) and Wopko Jensma (Can Temba and I Know the Heroes on the album are his), the enigmatic Jo’burg poet, swallowed by the city in 1993.
“In these subterranean rooms, my entrails are the paperweights,” Van Heerden speaks Wopko’s words. “I keep singing this song, of one thousand unmade beds, of one thousand dust bins, of one thousand dark alleys, of one thousand chicken livers —”
And then a violin strikes up, and the melancholy yields a crack, and that is that, the spooky attraction from a distance is complete.
Mud Ensemble 1993-1999 is available from www.amatafula.com. Spooky Attraction from a Distance’s Sunflower Sutra is available from www.staubgold.com. Look out for Spooky gigs over the course of the year. Albums will also be for sale at shows