This track has fulfilled my expectations of The Jo’burg Sound, but due to the fact that my hatred of the central suburbs increases on a daily basis (no more Melville Yacht Basin for me), I’ve decided to rename the genre The Northern Suburban Sound, boo ya. By the way, I’m one of the guys on hand claps on this particular tune… yeah, that’s totally how I hand clap right there, baby…

Multi-Pattern – I’ve Been Looking For You

The following track is a mash-up of Pump Up The Jam by Technotronic and Alexander Robotnik’s Problemes D’Amour by my friend Paul, The King Of Town. It’s really nifty and I had spent many a night grooving to this tune before I found out that Paul himself had made it. So here we go, another little slice of Johannesburg at the motel…

Problemes De Technotronic

In the mid-nineties I used to work part-time at a record shop in the infamous area of Hillbrow. I worked for and left that paticular retailer so many times that they eventually wouldn’t hire me anymore. The mid-nineties era was the coolest, I used to live in Berea and after I got retrenched from Gallo records I didn’t have a company car no more. It was like living in the movie Candyman. At ten thirty at night I used to run through the most dangerous square kilometre, outside of a war zone, in the world at that time. I once walked down to the book shop on my lunch break and after I returned I saw a whole troop of emergency vechiles driving down the road. One of security gaurds went outside to find out what was going on. He came back and calmly mentioned that about five people were dead on the pavement outside the take-aways across the road from the book shop. Some sort of drug deal gone wrong or something. Yet another in a lifetime of close shaves. The building I used to live in was across the road from a really dodgy looking property. The one night in a THC haze I was awoken by the sound of automatic weapon fire. I crept up to sneak a look over the balcony wall and ended up seeing a few people lying on the pavement. I still remember thinking “Well somebody must have heard those shots” and going back to sleep.

During this period Hip Hop was huuuugggeeee in Hilbrow. Working at the shop was like a daily education in rap. I had been a fan of Hip Hop in my youth, stuff like Beat Street had made a huge impression on me. With time, during my teens, under the influence of indie, I had stopped listening to it. Stuff like De La Soul had got me back into things in the early nineties, but that mid-nineties Hillbrow period changed my life as far as black music is concerned. Ever met a white boy who practically cries whenever he hears Emotions by Destiny’s Child? Well, that’s me. Not that Emotions is from that period, it’s just that it made me appreciate Hip Hop and R n’ B ever since.
This mix is of more recent Hip Hop stuff, all from after 2000. I chose them for Lotus Over Water after we had a discussion about the current state of Hip Hop, so I’m hoping she likes them…

That’s the joint.

Another Night On Earth now has a badass banner which is looking tres spiffy. Mr. Keyz designed it, so if you’re looking for blog banners I’ll put a good word in for you ;). The Mtume track from today’s post pretty much sums up the mid-nineties Hillbrow vibe for me. “Beyond” is another Balearic Not Balearic classic and “25 or 6 to Four” is yet another reason why early Chicago (the band, good lord) deserves respect.

Sentiment is a really difficult thing. How do you express your feelings over something that has affected you deeply for all of your life without seeming dramatic. I had an idea to do a mix of tracks by k. d. lang about a week ago and the mix became something else entirely. I was listening to Dropout by Urge Overkill (again) thinking about how I’ve loved that song for so long without really understanding it’s true significance to my life. For years I thought of it as being about a young girl, all stylized as the perfect waif character, lost in the world. Truth is it very closely describes the life I led for many years. It also struck me how much it applies to so many of my crew, the boys I grew up with, the lost generation of whiteboys who “fucked-out” as we used to say back then. It’s difficult to describe what living under the apartheid government was like. When I think back the best way to describe it would be to say that there was never any air. You could breathe but nothing nourished you. When I was sixteen I refused to register for military service. My entire family was not aware of this and I kept it a secret. If I think about it now my motivation for everything was to get away from things and not towards them. By the age of seventeen I was blacklisted. This was not as significant as it sounds really, it never affected my life. I stayed in school and managed to get into university so I was safe. If I had continued to refuse national service without an official way of getting out of it I would have gone to jail for six years. This fact may be insignificant in retrospect but I honestly wonder now: how did a society that brought up it’s children in that way expect them to turn out if they treated them like that. It got me thinking about Karl. Karl was the older brother of one of my best friends in Primary School. During the BMX years he was our hero. He used to do off road racing and he was really good at it. He was even on a TV drama program for awhile. He was always my benchmark for how to survive within the circumstances we found ourselves. He went to university and studied journalism, I wanted to follow in his footsteps.

On Wednesday night I was speaking to my new friend Eran. He’s busy traveling at the moment, visiting the country of his birth, which is here due to the fact that his parents were working in Jo’burg when he was born. He’s from Israel and in a hardcore punk group. I was interested in what he had done as far as his military service was concerned. He told me that he had served two months in jail when he was younger. I thought that it was quite a strange time period to serve and he explained to me how it works. They put you in jail for two weeks. They don’t tell how long it’s going to be for, they don’t put you on trial. After two weeks they ask you again and so on. Depending on the political situation and other factors your time served is up to the whims of your captors. He was lucky I suppose but to hear him talk about it is pretty heavy. That is basically legalized torture.

The military issue was always an axe hanging over our heads. Two years before I would become eligible to serve in the military, South Africa experienced some of its worst township violence. One of Karl’s friends ended up going to the army around that time. He was an intelligent individual who would skillfully argue against apartheid, in the bravest fashion. Within about eight months of going into the military he came out on leave. He was dating one of my friends sisters at the time. He had become a raving racist. My friends sister was trying so hard to get him back on the ground, like where the fuck are you, what happened. He would tell us what happened, it did not sound good. In the townships they were basically at war. In the process he had learned to hate black people. The constant threat of dying had made him insane with hatred. His girlfriend ended up biting off one of his fingernails during a really violent fight that occurred later that evening. She was pregnant at the time and ended up having a boy called Christopher (named after me, yay!). They never married, she ended up with someone else, a family friend. They had been deeply in love.

The first time I ever smoked Mandrax I was walking with my two drug buddies back to Northcliff corner. They were both a year older than me and about to finish school. They were poor kids whose parents would not have been able to put them into university even if their school marks had been good enough. Alister started talking about going into the army, asking in our lingo if my other friend thought it was inevitable that he would have to go. He was scared. He OD’ed on Wellconal a year later. A few years ago so did Karl. This mix is for my friends, the one’s who did not make it through the wilderness, the ones who barely did and for the rest of us lucky ones. May we never go “there” again.
Both The Oppressed And The Accused

Image: The death of Ken Oosterbroek, 1994.

Chants d’Auvergne with Victoria de los Angeles is one of my all time favourite albums. I heard it for the first time around 1999 when EMI were doing their Great Recordings Of The Century reissue series. I was working in Cape Town, doing stock admin and every new item that came in for the first time had to be recorded for the listening database. It took really long for the company that did the recording to come collect the items, so they would end up sitting on my desk for weeks sometimes. One day I hooked up some headphones I found lying around to my PC and started to listen to stuff that had come in. My boss, who was not a man to easily allow hapiness amongst his minions, used to constantly be on my back about it. I stuck to my guns and my headphones and did not live to regret it. In those pre to early days of file sharing I found myself in a fairly priveliged position of listening to many, many new releases. The guy who used to do our classical buying was the coolest. He was a borderline psychotic who was known for breaking up liasons between consenting males while he was cruising the street for action of his own. I thought he was a peach and we became good buddies. He constantly gave me awesome recommendations for stuff to listen to, such as Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Canticus Articus (previously posted) and Chants d’Auvergne. The songs are arrangements of folk pieces from the Auvergne region in the higher southern part of France by Joseph Canteloube. Since Moka is living in Montpellier (in the south of France) I thought it would be a good time to post some tunes from the album. Grey Lagoons has again been called into action for a mix job, inspired, themseves, by the story Brian Eno once told about his inspiration for Music For Airports. Apparently a German friend of his had made him a tape using only the slow movements of Haydn’s late string quartets. Eno described the music on the tape as being in a place and not moving anywhere away from there. The Lagoons were asked to try and achieve a similar sense with this rather luscious music. The lyrics are written in Occitan, which is a language native to parts of the south of France and Catalonia, besides other smaller pockets. Hope you enjoy the mix!

Also featured on today’s blog entry is the first track ever by the Grey Lagoons. It seems that Acid Jazz may have left the mainstream but has lingered within the lagoons, sticking to the rivers and the lakes that it’s used too. The guy talking on the track may sound utterly stoned out of his mind but in fact was quite sober during this recording, but he will still avoid playing it to members of his family due to the fact that they’ll never believe him, and may accuse him of being back on the sauce. The song is still in demo format and will be reworked and reposted in the near future.

Canteloube – Chant’s d’Auvergne

Grey Lagoons – Home Pills Demo

P. S. Today I have chosen three tracks for the mighty Moka for www.anothernightonearth.blogspot.com/  . The track The Mexican by Babe Ruth is a Balearic Not Balearic track that was huge this summer in Sweden by some accounts. I thought that one was pretty darn applicable. The Smokin’ O. P.’s track is a cover of Love The One You’re With which has always been my favourite song to cheer me up when I’m homesick or missing someone. The first time I played the song to Mr. Keyz today, he asked me if I wasn’t actually a hippy. The answer to that is yes, first and foremost, all else follows. Lastly there’s Slabo Day by Peter Green, a rare Balearic Not Balearic classic that you don’t see around much these days. ‘Cept around my house. Not bragging or anything. Okay, a bit.