This article looks to the form of the puppet, both an oral and aural entity, as a receptacle or instrument which allows for a ventriloquism to take place in partnership with the puppeteer. In the work of South African Handspring Puppet Company, the puppet is a receptacle for sound, but also for the human body itself - a chamber within a chamber - highlighting the instrumentalisation of the body. In this regard, the article looks to Handspring's I Love You When (...) You're Breathing, particularly in reference to a comment once made by an audience member at a performance of the show that I watched in relation to the title; 'If you love me when I'm breathing; you don't love me when I'm dead?' In the practice of puppetry there is a focus on the ways the puppeteer conveys life in the puppet. Here, breath is significant as a sound, but more so as a movement, passed from puppeteer to puppet, a kind of bellows or organ. The 'life' of the puppet is discerned through the rhythmic breathing motions of the puppeteer. Here the aural is conveyed through movement, rather than through sound itself, which is further a reminder that sound is at its core a movement anyway, a vibration. What can be opened up if we are to think the oral/aural through the puppet in its relation to movement and stillness, life and death? (shrink)

Originally written as a lecture-presentation for the 2021 South African Society for Research in Music (SASRIM) conference, this text shares our ongoing collaborative study of Born Under the Heat, an album by Johnny Mbizo Dyani. Our research tracks the record(ings) to mark potential pathways for thinking about networks of sociality and solidarity that underpin the production of such politicised cultural work, as well as how we listen to and/or may read it. We trace how the album, recorded in 1983, was (...) born out of festival-gatherings in Lagos, Gaborone and Amsterdam as well as Dyani's memories/remembering of home (from Duncan Village to Dorkay House, perhaps) when exiled in Scandinavia. By reiterating literal and symbolic modes of travel which Born Under the Heat took, as an object and as a concept/project, we aim to explore multiple routes and forms archival, repatriation and restitution projects continue to find in the postapartheid present. (shrink)

Taking its cue from two instances of hyper-local jazz sociability along one street in Mamelodi, five years apart, the focus of this article is on three instances of public memorialisation and, through them, on how listening can be socialised and enculturated. It is an exploration both of how sociality is co-constituted through listening, and of how listening is socially constructed, attending to how people become members of aural collectives in distinctive ways. It foregrounds how mostly working-class people living under conditions (...) seldom of their own making continue, in the avowedly postapartheid context, at least partially to remake their worlds sonically, foregrounding the public cultures that they thereby aurally co-create as a notable cultural expression in and of themselves. Methodologically, it considers how recourse to non-elite aesthetics, viewed as repertoires of living, offer alternatives to the claims of both ethnographies and social histories 'from below' to present 'the word' of the community' in an authoritative sense. (shrink)

This article aims to listen, read and move with the South African musician Abdullah Ibrahim by focusing on various works in his corpus that see him weave together a sonic aesthetic and identify sound, space and time as fundamentally intertwined with and constituted by the experiences of racial violence and anti-blackness in a modern colonial world. Part of our critical pursuit is to highlight Abdullah Ibrahim as a theorist of black geography invested in the everyday sounds ringing through the ghettoes, (...) townships and reserves created as debased and inexhaustible reservoirs for cheap labour by colonial-apartheid regimes. We will also examine how some of Abdullah Ibrahim's music interrogates the status of the black subject through the modalities of a black Islamic sonic aesthetic. This is one of the factors which qualifies it as a layered site of mythical and experimental histories and enables us to identify his body of work as deeply connected with the articulations of loss, suffering, the cadence of change, and hope. (shrink)

The following essay is part of a body of work titled Signal to Noise: sound and fury in (post)apartheid South Africa. These are a collection of creative non-fiction essays set against the backdrop of my involvement with a small, independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg between 1983 and 1997. The metaphor of a drowning signal, pushing through and making itself heard above the noise, resonates throughout the collection. The complexities of the political versus artistic nature of what we were (...) involved with provide a setting for an anecdotal approach to what is part history, part biography, part memoir and part theoretical sonic exploration. The following essay falls into this approach and is constructed from memories enhanced by diaries, scrap-books, shards of notes, lyrics, photos and conversations. These have been employed in reconstructing a narrative arc that covers the recording of the first album made by the band Sankomota, who were banned from entry into South Africa and were based in Maseru, mostly playing to audiences at one of the leading hotels. Sankomota, then called Uhuru, experienced extraordinary, almost metaphysical, peaks and troughs throughout their nearly thirty-year existence hence the hauntological device in the title. The record was also the first made in our fledgling mobile studio using newly affordable equipment that kickstarted many such do-it-yourself projects worldwide. This was the first in a steady stream of technologies that would eventually break the hegemony of mainstream record companies. In apartheid South Africa, this was hugely significant, as being able to sideline the censorship of state-owned media enterprises meant immense freedom in the kind of projects one came to consider. Savage incidents of force and brutality were still common then, and our small venture has to be seen in the context of broader unrest and suffering. Frank Leepa was an uncompromising survivor. His words and melodies still move and inspire a younger generation. (shrink)