SENSA presents dictyopteric
Fri Mar 10, 18:00 - Fri Mar 10, 22:00
M-PIRE Music
ABOUT
Doors 6pm, music from 7:30pm!
R160 online, R180 at the door!
Bring your own drinks and snacks (picnic baskets)
We're excited to announce dictyopteric, a performance by Juliana Venter and a number of local artists on Friday, 10 March while she's visiting Cape Town.
Juliana Venter is a multidisciplinary artist and primarily a vocalist who works with notated and free-improvised music, classical and extended vocal techniques, contemporary music, noise, jazz, baroque music, folk music expressions from Norway, Southern Africa, West Africa, and Central Asia, Arabic music, and Japanese and Chinese traditional musical expressions. She is also an actress who operates in both film and theatre. She has composed pieces for large and original ensembles as well as solo works. In addition, she has done countless cross-genre performance concerts and music/theatre performances.
Juliana is known for her heartfelt voice, wide palette and her ground-breaking and at times extreme expression. She has been called by the press, “the queen of South African avant-garde”. She was lead singer in the music and performance band The Mud Ensemble from Johannesburg, which achieved cult status as pioneers in avant-garde music theatre in South Africa in the 1990s.
Dictyopteric is an encounter, through improvised and composed music, of the soul of Sub-Saharan man. This encounter is mediated by our connection with the spiritual aspect of the insect, specifically the white ant and the mantis. Both of these insect groups occupy a powerful position is the folklores and cultural paraphernalia of the various cultures that inhabit the Southern continent.
Conceived as part of a larger project by Juliana Venter and various other Southern and Central African musicians and artists, dictyopteric should be viewed as a musical seed of a collective creative utterance that would, through the acts of spontaneous and meditated composition, illuminate and uncover various cultural, scientific, and mythological artefacts of the inner life of what we deem to be human, centred around the place where humanity took its first steps.
On the evening, she will be joined by the following musicians:
Brydon Bolton
Garth Erasmus
Jacques van Zyl
John Pringle
Sylvestre Kabassidi
Brydon Bolton is an accomplished performer and composer. He has toured extensively and has composed music for many award-winning plays, documentaries and dance works.
His influences are diverse and cover everything from world- and classical music to glitch and trance.
He is the bottom end of legendary South African improv trio Benguela.
Garth Erasmus is a visual artist and musician whose work focuses on SA`s First Nation people, the KhoiSan, which is his heritage. Originally from the Eastern Cape he now lives and works in Kraaifontein (outside Cape Town).
Garth is part of the activist music and poetry group, Khoi Khonnexion, that toured European music theatre festivals in 2018-19 with the production House of Falling Bones which is based on the genocide of the Nama and Herero people by the German colonialists in South West Africa (now Namibia). He is is also a member of the Khoisan Gypsy Band whose theatre production Die Poet Wie`s Hy? on the work of Adam Small won Best Production at the STELLENBOSCH WOORDFEES 2020.
Garth’s sonic collaboration with flautist Esther Marié Pauw enacts forms of decolonial aesthesis, and interventionist curating amidst publics, institutions, art, and music-making. They have presented sound events on Roesdorp forced-removals (2015), on Dutch-Khoi colonial encounters (Khoi’npsalms, 2018, with organist Francois Blom), on the first owners’ ghosts at 7 Joubert Street (Suiwer in Blauw, 2018), Garden Music (Johnman Centre in 2019, 2020) and Something in Return (on DARK DARK GALLERY by Greg de Cuir Jr., 2020). In 2020, in response to the Covid-19 lockdown, Garth initiated the Africa Open Improvisation Collective with musicians connected to Stellenbosch University`s Africa Open Institute (AOI). This collective maintained monthly Zoom music-making sessions throughout the lockdown period. The idea behind this decolonial exercise is to create a nexus between Western Classical and African Classical musics and break down heirarchical structures and attitudes. The collective`s free improvisations can be heard on:
https://soundcloud.com/user-610733588.
Jacques van Zyl was born in Uitenhage, South Africa in 1963. Under the working name hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e, he performs as a noise musician and sound artist, touching upon the fields of installation sound art, musique concrète, harsh noise wall, and improvisation. His works and performance events unfold according to a scheme that he terms “generalised music”, where the artist or musician is any person who either creates or reproduces an intended gesture using sound, irrespective of either the nature of the sonic material that is being created or reproduced, or whether the instrument that produces the sound is a living or non-living object, a traditional musical instrument, an electronic or mechanical sound generator, or simply a commercial music player, and where any recorded sound becomes the raw, operated-upon material for the creation of a musical or sonic event or mode. His approach therefore skirts authorship and post-human relationality by creating a surplus of uncodifiable, unmediated bidirectional interfaces between the inner workings of human and electrical machines, which are then perceived and interpreted by the human mind through conflating the seemingly antithetical notions of silence and sound.
In a career that spans more than two decades, he has performed alongside and collaborated with a number of artists and musicians. These have at various times included Minnette Vári, Stefanus Rademeyer, Brendon Bussy, Belinda Blignaut, Jason Stapleton, Coffin Soup, Ski Crime, Gwaing, Andrea Dicò, Garth Erasmus, Justin Allart, Aragorn Eloff, Vanessa Lorenzo, Rhéa Dally, Martin Perret, Miranda Moss, Agnes Pe, Vanessà Heer, Monomort, Mia Thom, Pierre-Henri Wicomb, Esther Marié Pauw, John Pringle, Charmaine Lee, Dimitri della Faille, and many others.
His conceptual project hAshtAgblAck.n.o.i.s.e is a musical exploration of the unsilent silences, whether conceptual or actual, which frame and define our various generalised sonic environments.
John Pringle studied classical percussion under the guidance of Suzette Brits at the University of Stellenbosch between 2001 and 2004. During this time until 2007 he was a permanent member of both the KEMUS contemporary music ensemble and the US Percussion Ensemble, performing works by Béla Bartók, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Minoru Miki, Theo Herbst, Peter Klatsow, and many others. From 2007 till 2011 he, along with three fellow composers, Brydon Bolton, Jan-Hendrik Harley, and Pierre-Henri Wicomb, formed EJNCP, a new music ensemble playing exclusively original compositions by the members. He has performed well known modern repertoire, and presented his own compositions at various festivals, New Music SA's Unyazi and Grahamstown Fringe, Infecting the city, KKNK, Woordfees etc.
His work as a freelance music teacher since 2003, and life long interest in the traditional music styles and rhythms of the African continent has in recent years lead to the writing and publishing of a series of educational books, "Examination Pieces for the Djembe", aimed at introducing the Djembe drum into the schooling system in an easily examinable format. These publications have been followed by a set of entry-level drumline tutorial books titled "My First Drumline", books 1 & 2. John is a founding member of Room11, a contemporary free improvisation trio consisting of a live visual artist, piano and percussion, he is an active jazz drummer, performing on a regular basis with the Real Wicomb Trio, and has keen interest in various ethnic percussion styles from across Europe and Africa, resulting in his involvement in the Here be Dragons project.
Juliana Venter was born in Pretoria and raised in an Afrikaans family in South Africa and Namibia, where she studied opera and piano. She lived and works in Johannesburg, Cape Town, London, Scotland, Cologne, Berlin and Norway.
Upcoming releases:
May 5th 2023
If you find yourself falling dive!
As part of a compilation with tap dancer Janne Eraker, she appears on a track for voice and tap dance.
Three days of improvisation in an old wooden theatre on the shores of the Oslo Fjord on Nesodden led to “If you find yourself falling dive!”
Duo for voice and saxophone
Autumn 2023 will be the release of duo record Rolf-Erik Nystrøm and Juliana Venter on Grappa.
Recorded at Uglalyd on Nesodden.
Produced by Rolf Wallin.
Co produced by Morten Qvenhild.
With guest musicians:
Paal Nilssen-Love ; drums.
Nils Øgland ; fiddle
Mats Eilertsen; double bass.
Releases of albums in 2022
Paal Nilssen-Love circus album “pairs of three”
https://pnlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/pairs-of-three
Norwegian composer Cecilie Ore’s Katsu!
Based on Japanese death poems.
Written for Juliana Venter and Rolf- Erik Nystrøm. Premièred at Ultima festival September 2021.
Norsk Musikforlag
Katsu! by Cecilie Ore
Cobi Van Tonder’s “Echoes and Reflections”
https://www.acousticatlas.de/echoesalbum
https://telepathicbeing.bandcamp.com/.../echoes-and...
By South African composer Cobi Van Tonder with collaborations from musicians across the globe.
Sylvestre Kabassidi is part of a quiet revolution in African Music whose approach emphasizes fragile melodies and poetic lyrics rather than super-produced floor burners. He is a rebel with a sensitive soul whose music breaks stereotypes and takes African song in a new direction.
Style: Soul, African Music, Acoustic
Link: https://soundcloud.com/sylvestre_kabassidi
Origin: Congo-Brazzaville