Notes on Cuts (2023)^{[1]Peffer, John. 2023. Notes on Cuts. New York, NY: Nothing to Commit Records. 12” vinyl LP + 46-page sewn-bound book. Edition of 250.} is a combined 12-inch vinyl record and 46-page book by art historian John Peffer, published by Nothing to Commit Records in New York. The project documents and analyses the physical censorship of records by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during the apartheid period. To prevent broadcast, songs judged politically or morally objectionable were sometimes scratched, scored, or physically cut, rendering them unplayable in part or whole. Peffer’s work presents these altered records as both archival evidence of state censorship and as material capable of generating new auditory experiences that deepen understanding and, arguably, ethical education.

The book component provides historical background on SABC censorship practices, drawing on Peffer’s own archival research in collections at SABC headquarters in Johannesburg, as well as in regional libraries such as Polokwane and Cape Town. It situates the cuts and marks within the bureaucratic apparatus of apartheid censorship, including official policies and ad hoc interventions by station staff. The notes catalogue not only the kinds of inscriptions found on censored records—such as handwritten “AVOID” labels, but also the systematic destruction of transcription discs and the contradictions inherent in a state that preserved and circulated its own, self-censored output. In Peffer’s own words, these notes of his ‘include basic background data, image analysis of scratches and other signage, and subjective commentary on the look and feel and sound of censorship. It is a listening guide, but the listener is encouraged to draw their own lines and follow them.’ (Peffer 2023, p. 12)

The accompanying vinyl record compiles recordings of selected scratched and cut discs. Peffer sequenced the tracks experimentally, starting with short examples and progressing to longer pieces, including one infinite locked groove on side A and a merged piece on side B. The record foregrounds the sonic consequences of censorship, such as skips, loops, and interruptions, while the book provides the visual and historical framework.

Together, the record and book establish Notes on Cuts as both an archival intervention and a creative work, documenting the mechanisms of apartheid censorship and re-presenting its material traces.

Niklas Zimmer, “Marks by hand,” notebook drawing, 2025.

Faced with a release like Notes on Cuts, the role of the (music) critic is destabilised, as is that of the reader of (music) criticism. In that sense, you and I are in unfamiliar territory here. The familiar posture—evaluating, comparing, finding fault or strength in performance, composition, or production—sits uneasily here. Can one approach this publication critically, in the sense of “reviewing” it against some standard? Perhaps, but in light of the immense rarity of labours of love as thorough and fascinating as this one, that would feel like a particularly unconstructive, and, frankly, unkind, way of engaging/refusing engagement, likely missing the central points Peffer is making from the outset. We must receive this work differently: as historical, musicological, and formal research condensed into the double form of record and book.

The publication presents itself as evidence: it shares samples of music and the wreckage of those samples. It is archival testimony, forensic listening, historical reconstruction, and conceptual art object all at once.

Listening through the “Notes on Cuts” LP, one is confronted not only with “tracks” but with the bureaucratic cuts that sought to erase them; not only with an archive of music but with its deep scars. It would be quite nonsensical, under such conditions, to inhabit the critic’s role of weighing whether this “album” succeeds or fails. What would failure mean, when the premise is that these grooves were already failed, already damaged, before they were ever replayed? Indeed, much of what we get to listen to on “Notes on Cuts” was never before heard on air in South Africa.

Zimmer, Niklas. PXL_20250831_081946071.RAW-01.COVER.jpg. 2025. Photograph of our living room with my favourite chair (a sidewalk find!) and John Peffer’s “Notes on Cuts” LP.

This is not to say this LP record, as an assemblage/a sampler, of damaged historical music recordings, cannot be evaluated. Instead, it is to say that judgment begins elsewhere, starting with the acknowledgement that the labour here—archival, curatorial, analytical—is prior to what any aesthetic commentary could (and should) meaningfully be brought to bear upon. The aesthetic experience itself includes John the curator, who bears and embeds the cuts of apartheid censorship into the grooves of his contemporary pressing. The critic’s task is displaced by something closer to witness, or custodian, or listener-scholar. One can debate sequencing, one can question choices of inclusion or exclusion, but the frame itself demands noting: what I am holding in my hands, what I am reading through and listening to is an artefact born of years of searching, handling, listening, recollecting, arranging and describing under conditions few others have had the patience or the access to pursue. More than thirty years after the first democratic elections, this is a late, sonic release. John’s pressing is a relief, for while hearing the truth may hurt, silence still remains violence.

Niklas Zimmer, “Marks by hand,” notebook drawing, 2025.

There is a long, eccentric history of records issued for indexical listening rather than entertainment. These are often filed under the topic “Non-Music.”

In medical training, LPs like Auscultation of the Heart (J. B. Barlow & W. A. Pocock, London Records, 1962) compiled phonocardiographic examples—first/second heart sounds, systolic and diastolic murmurs—explicitly as instructional audio documents. Smithsonian Folkways likewise published scientific and natural history discs in the late 1950s–60s, including Charles M. Bogert’s Sounds of North American Frogs (1958) and Albro T. Gaul’s Sounds of Insects (1960), both conceived as annotated sound archives for study. In parallel, Irv Teibel’s environments series (1969–79) presented processed and unadorned environmental recordings—“the psychologically ultimate seashore,” aviary soundscapes—explicitly framed as psychoacoustic documents and domestic tools.

Closer to the material critique of the medium are artists’ records that foreground damage and constraint as form. Christian Marclay’s Record Without a Cover (1985) was sold deliberately unsleeved so that shipping and handling would abrade the surface; the accumulated scratches become part of the composition. Milan Knížák’s Broken/Destroyed Music (initiated mid-1960s) systematically scratched, cut, glued and reassembled commercial discs so that their enforced malfunctions produced new works—an explicit poetics of modification and failure. A related tradition uses the locked groove—infinite loops cut into the runout—as the primary unit; RRRecords’ RRR-500 (1998) collects 500 such loops (250 per side), with earlier and later compilations exploring the same limit condition of the medium.

Finally, there are documentary compilations where signal supplants song: The Conet Project (Irdial-Discs, 1997), a multi-disc survey of shortwave “numbers stations,” treats broadcast artefacts as historical evidence and listening material. Taken together, these precedents clarify how Peffer’s LP+book joins—and pointedly extends—an established lineage of records that function as archives pressed to vinyl. Yet Notes on Cuts is distinct in that its source noises (scratches, cuts, locked loops) are not natural or technological byproducts but bureaucratic inscriptions of censorship—then re-audited and sequenced as both evidence (“Non-Music”) and work (“Music”).

“First, I had to submerge myself in the dust of this huge propaganda bureaucracy. Then, I wanted to attempt to understand it against itself, in some kind of more fully visceral or sensorial way. I wanted to use my senses against the censor, to exorcise the cuts by holding them close, rubbing up against them, and feeling their contours.” (Peffer 2023, p. 13)

So, after a long, long period of reflection turned into outright avoidance, prevarication, angsting, doubting, all that, what I ended up doing in response to John’s work was not to generate more writing (I am doing this after the fact, what you are reading is being typed up at the proverbial/literal 11^th hour before this herri goes live). John has already done so much writing! It is all there to read for anyone who picks up Notes on Cuts. Please, dear reader, you must get your hands on a copy to engage with; it is so very well worth it. Visit your library and request that they purchase one. Anyway, what else could I do in response to this work but play; play with, play along, play on, play against the loops … allowing my body, my senses to guide me. Framed with Wittgenstein, John has already said “all that can be said clearly”; so I am left with “whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.”^{[2]Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung – the Ludwig Wittgenstein Project.” n.d.} Wordless, perhaps, but still sensually alive in time and place. For now.

Audio clip: Response I: short study over the loop (entry, placement, restraint) over Peffer’s Side A loop; Attempting economy—precise entries/exits against the loop’s hard resets; focus on micro-timing more than density.

For me, the body itself became a re-sounding archive. In John’s project, the records carry scars of censorship, visible and audible traces of a violent bureaucracy. In submitting to drumming through the relentless repetition of the end of Side A, the body was bearing the archive: each strike is not only a sonic event but a record of physical insistence, of resistance enacted through muscles and tendons, through repetition and micro-variation of movement.

The loop I am playing with is simultaneously an adversary and a higher ground. It is not background; it is loud, another player, non-human, but mimicking, transmitting what is most human: the voice, a cappella, unisono. I was leaning into this loop, pushing against its frightening relentlessness, allowing, provoking it to open up and morph, sometimes trying to smother it under waves of rhythm, carving small fissures of syncopation that let its mechanical persistence show through. Negotiating with an immovable sonic object, the struggle was tactile, audible, and insistent.

Stylistically, what I found myself doing resonates with the traditions of free improvisation, the sheer physicality and dense layering of Han Bennink and Tony Oxley, the sculptural percussive explorations of Chris Corsano. But there was also the meditative side of minimalist performance here: a durational practice akin to Terry Riley or Reich, but translated into the grammar of the drum kit.

As I play, I feel the reverberation of censorship itself. The sharp stick strikes and cymbal shimmers echo the archival cuts. Just as the censors’ marks were at once destructive and creative, my gestures inscribe both rupture and continuity. Each beat is an inscription, labour in sound that mirrors, in reverse, the bureaucratic labour of censorship.

Niklas Zimmer, “Marks by hand,” notebook drawing, 2025.

But what strikes me most is the intimacy. This is not performance for display but for presence. It is happening in my own lived space, surrounded by books, vinyl, instruments—a practice that is less about spectacle than about thinking-through-sound. It is personal, ongoing, and intimate work.

Ultimately, what I am doing is counter-archival inscription.

Where John cut and assembled from the damaged records, I cut and assemble through rhythm, gesture, persistence. My improvisation is bodily and intellectual work at once, resonating with his years of archival labour. It is a form of answer, an embodied way of learning from what he has uncovered and offered.

Video recording of playing along to the loop on Side A [B].

If the artist’s motivations are, in principle, unknowable — and perhaps it is not even desirable to desire to know them — can the same be said of the curator? The artist may withdraw behind the work; the curator, by contrast, seems beholden to a more stable, knowable set of constraints and frameworks that justify their efforts: the essay, the exhibition, the intervention where artist and curator fuse, or, as here, a produced object in the world, an LP record. John Peffer’s practice reads as a museum-inflected mission of aesthetic education, oriented toward the capacities of citizens rather than the appetites of markets. It stands far from the postmodern, indeed neoliberal, “anything goes” that flourishes as long as the art market continues to boom. In Peffer’s approach, material is drawn from the archive and from witnesses, producers, subjects, individuals, a social body in Bourdieu’s sense, and then recast in tangible, aesthetic form according to hard-won, carefully gleaned insights and working concepts. The aim is direct, telling access to complex historical, political, and social circumstances. There is much to learn here.

The elephant in the room is obvious enough: why, in 2025, would anyone choose to listen to a record built around the sounds of damaged grooves — scratches, loops, clicks, skips — pressed to vinyl. Notes on Cuts proposes that damage is not a void but a trace. The shattering effects of censorship are audible as form. Rather than treating scratches as negation, the record solicits listening as a reconstruction of conditions, an encounter with the way force leaves marks.

“…I was overtaken by an amour fou or madness for the archive that I had spent so much time with skin-to-skin, day after day. In spite of the fact that these cut songs were not meant to be heard, I began to wonder what the different kinds of inscription would sound like if I played them anyway. I thought, ‘To hell with that, I want to hear what they have to say.’ I was filled with a desire to abuse this archive in return, so that what it contained might flower again. For this I’d need to apply the stochastic and musique concrète methods of the avant-gardists, and to the kinds of purposeful mishandling and recoding of grooves done by scratch-and-mix DJs. Could the censorial marks be played aloud as a dub plate? Why not counter this dismal archive by making it do what it was least intended to do, that is, to have its media replayed, remixed, and redirected. I thought: By deep listening to the visible crossings-out, let us now create new opportunities to bring to fuller presence the multiple layers of historical encounters embodied there.” (Peffer 2023, p. 6)

At the centre stands a very specific object. Notes on Cuts is a vinyl record and book project that explores the physical damage done to records by censors at the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) during apartheid. Songs were literally cut to prevent them from being broadcast. Written and recorded by art historian John Peffer, the project takes a creative approach to the sonic, visual, and haptic dimensions of the bureaucracy of censorship in all its banal ridiculousness:

“Yes, even those transcription disks paid for by the SABC, recorded in SABC studios by, in some cases, the SABC’s own orchestras, and pressed and packed at the SABC record factory. These, too, fell under the scribbly pen and the knife.” (Peffer 2023, p. 6)

The liner notes historicise the songs, itemise the scratches, and ponder the new beats and tunes created. The censors’ cuts are held up for visual analysis and then played back anyway, in order to find what secrets may be revealed. Sometimes the scratches point to or cause repetition of the places where “offensive” material might be hidden. Sometimes new and even marvellous sounds result from the skips and clicks caused by the censor’s hand. The record is issued as a 12” vinyl LP (Nothing to Commit Records, NTC003, 2023), accompanied by a 46-page sewn-bound book with black-and-white and colour reproductions, offset printed on 120 gsm stock, in an edition of 250.

This listening is not an exercise in excavating intentions. It is a construction of a listening space: particular, disciplined, and pointedly historical.

“Today the SABC Record Library is one of the most historically important South African archives. It is a national treasure that should be preserved. It is also an accidental archive of the historical institutional damage done to its own holdings, as well as to its own personnel. It is a cautionary tale. It is a record of its own unreason, and of its own absurd wastefulness. Most importantly, it is a uniquely visible, tactile, and audible record of what archivists in a censorial bureaucracy did to themselves [emphasis in original]. Few archives can claim as many senses. It is an archive that shows the failure of a repressive system and the actual physical mechanics of it. For these reasons, it is even more of a national treasure, worth careful maintenance so that future generations may follow its traces and learn from this mistake.” (Peffer 2023, p. 15)

The Apartheid regime (1948–1994) unfolded within what Benjamin termed the age of mechanical reproduction^{[3]Benjamin, Walter. 1936. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” marxists.}; the technologies of recording and replay, and their bureaucratic regulation, are part of that history. In this light, the broken loop ceases to be a mere defect and becomes a sign — indexical of policy, practice, and pressure.

“Today the copies that remain are buried in the archives and never played on air, while precious few others are dispersed within mostly private collections. It is one of the many contradictions of the apartheid era that, in its effort to constrain, it also preserved a legacy, even if that preservation has amounted to an entombment.” (Peffer 2023, p. 10)

A common response to audible damage is to avert the ear: to accept the track as spoiled, to mute or discard it. Notes on Cuts refuses that reflex.

It holds the marked object up to the light and asks us to look and listen again, not to fetishise ruin but to apprehend how force has been applied and how it circulates.

The work nudges reception away from the complacent certainty that an “original” could be restored, and toward the recognition that repetition, censorship, and wear are constitutive.

Peffer’s role here is not reducible to a single function. He operates across research, documentation, and composition in ways that make the curatorial position legible without turning it into authorship-as-explanation. Fieldwork sits at the centre of this. In his own words:

“I was at SABC Auckland Park mostly. Also was at Polokwane and at Cape Town briefly. I heard Durban and PE and maybe Bloem have cool items, but I did not get there. Auckland Park is the central library and that is where orders came from. I handled almost every disk in the place! Paper records were kept in some odd places, but I did get to look at much of that. You know the people who work there were kind and generous. The political appointees behaved as can be expected.” (Interview with John Peffer, August 2025.)

In drumming “on top of” the LP’s looping, and—arguably—by recording it and sharing this recording with you, the reader/listener/viewer here in herri, I am adding another layer of authorship. Beneath that sits John Peffer, curator-as-author, assembling, sequencing, contextualising. Beneath him, the apartheid-era censor, the SABC employee gouging the vinyl with a sharp object. Beneath that, a subset of technical staff involved in creating the recording of the music as we hear it (or, in places, frustratedly fail to hear it). Beneath them, the network of “actual” authors of the music: the performers, who may be interpreters of a composer’s prior score, or who may themselves be the composers. And beneath even this: the broader culture, the hegemonic circles, the environment of valuing, listening, dancing, patronage—where the snake bites its tail.

Niklas Zimmer. Layers of authorship & activity. 2025. Conceptual drawing, version A (using an LLM).

Here, the real-political “us” is implicated, not in an ideological imaginary, but as contemporary witnesses, as participants in the perpetual re-creation of culture. And this record does not allow us to hear only creation; it makes us hear destruction as well. The SABC archive becomes the stage on which democratically ‘liberated’ South Africa’s near-impossible task is rehearsed: to integrate so much historical violence and negation into an effective process of forgiveness and reconciliation. The record demands that creation and destruction be confronted together, as one inseparable history—folded into a meaningful, i.e. also necessarily aesthetic, experience.

Niklas Zimmer. Layers of authorship & activity. 2025. Conceptual drawing, version B (using a DAW).

Niklas Zimmer. DSCF2210. 2025. Photograph of our living room with my drum kit, our bookshelf, and John Peffer’s “Notes on Cuts” LP.

“The photograph presents a domestic studio and reading space in which musical practice, scholarship, and listening converge. At the centre of the scene is a drum kit, complete with snare, toms, bass drum, cymbals, and a stick bag containing brushes and mallets. A microphone on a stand is positioned toward the kit, indicating that this is not merely an instrument for casual play but part of a rehearsal or recording environment. To the right, a turntable sits on a wooden stand with a vinyl record in place, reinforcing the importance of both sound reproduction and archival listening in this space.

 The shelving behind the kit carries books, equipment, and a prominently displayed copy of John Peffer’s Notes on Cuts LP and book. The record, with its stark white book insert, functions not only as an object of listening but also as a visual centrepiece. Its placement among volumes of art, history, literature, and philosophy situates it directly within an intellectual as well as personal context, aligning it with scholarship as much as with artistic practice.

Audio equipment further reinforces the sense of a working studio. KRK Rokit monitors are placed at either end of the shelving, creating a stereo field for critical listening. The combination of turntable, monitors, drum kit, and microphone suggests a domestic laboratory for sound — a space where archival records, live instruments, and scholarly reflection intersect. In the mirror mounted above the shelf, the figure of a person in green is visible with camera and microphone equipment, adding another layer of mediation and underscoring the performative and documented quality of the setting.

The visual elements carry strong symbolic weight. The oval mirror expands the space, but it also functions metaphorically, reflecting back on the act of listening and recording. It recalls Peffer’s own method of turning scratches and cuts into objects of renewed attention by literally holding them up to the light. The framed photograph above the mirror depicts a landscape of water and vegetation strewn with discarded objects. Its imagery resonates with themes of archive, ruin, and recovery, presenting beauty and meaning drawn from places of damage and neglect.

Taken as a whole, the room is neither sterile nor purely functional. It is intimate, lived-in, and layered, with academic books, vinyl records, live instruments, and recording technology coexisting in a single field of vision. The space embodies the continuum between private research and public cultural production, refusing the division between scholarship, curating, creativity, and play. In this way, the photograph does not simply document a setting; it stages the very questions pursued in the accompanying essay. Notes on Cuts appears here not as an isolated artefact, but as part of a life devoted to listening, drumming, archiving, and reflecting, where personal and professional practices fuse seamlessly.”

ChatGPT (OpenAI). 2025. Analysis of photograph DSCF2210 (Photograph of our living room at home with my drum kit, our bookshelf, and John Peffer’s “Notes on Cuts” LP). Generated text, Cape Town, South Africa.

When I sat down at the drums, I was not trying to “add” to John’s work, nor to interpret it in some authoritative way. I was simply resonating with it in my body. In our living room, with the record spinning on the turntable, the last track on Side A, that endlessly repeating loop of “Kuyo ILo-Ntolongo”, became a companion, a provocation.

Audio clip: Locked groove, Side A of Notes on Cuts (loop recorded directly from vinyl); Hear the skip pattern as meter, or the shifting wholeness of sound as pulse; this is the reference grid for all subsequent responses.

Its censor’s scratch locks the music into a fragment that refuses to resolve. It circles back and back, never completing, never moving forward. I let myself enter that circle with brushes, sticks, and mallets in my hands. John somewhat prefigures this kind of interaction in his introductory essay:

“…I imagine a DJ could create infinite loops and perverse locked grooves from these hard skips, returning to them as emphasis instead of erasure. The click of the cut itself becomes a new beat, on top of the original rhythm of the song, on top of and revealing the hard pulse of a former authority, while undermining that authority.” (Peffer 2023, p. 3)

I recorded for a few hours. What I am sharing here with some trepidation are a few short cuts from that session — “short cuts” here in a different sense from John’s “Short Cuts.” Mine are selections, moments, cuttings-out from an unbroken improvisation that traced the loop again and again. I was playing along, or perhaps playing against, or maybe just playing with: testing what could happen when my own grooves encountered that enforced groove, when my own scratches met those inscribed by apartheid’s bureaucrats decades ago.

Audio clip: Response II: interlock and displacement over Peffer’s Side A loop; off-accent taps create a second pulse that phases with the loop before re-aligning.

The experience felt less like playing over a backing track than like sharing space with a scar. The locked groove was not a neutral accompaniment but a wound, repeating itself. My drumming was a way of being with that wound. Not healing it, not amplifying it, but acknowledging it. Each cymbal shimmer or snare crack became another layer of time on top of the frozen time of the record, perhaps mimicking the weave of countless evocative pops that the censors incised in the vinyls.

Each gesture was a reminder that history persists in sound, that silence and erasure can themselves be heard if you listen carefully enough.

Niklas Zimmer, “Marks by hand,” notebook drawing, 2025.

I do not think of this as a composition or a grand statement. I am not a professional, let alone a virtuoso, and I do not aspire to be. I am an amateur, a homebody with my thoughts, a pen, some sticks in hand, feeling my way across skins and cymbals in love with the sound of the record as it has survived. To me, this was less about performance than about being present with John’s work — the years of research, listening, interviewing, writing, all condensed into this vinyl artefact. My drumming was an act of listening as much as of playing: listening to the loop, to the room, to my own body’s attempt to respond with care, with persistence, with gratitude.

In this sense, the act of drumming folds back into the same archival logic John lays bare in the liner notes. He handles the damaged records as evidence, as traces of authoritarian bureaucracy and of musical life persisting within them. I, in turn, handled his artefact — the loop cut into vinyl — and let my sticks make contact with it through improvisation. If the censor’s scratch was meant to silence, my drumming sought neither to drown it out nor to redeem it, but simply to hold it in company for a while, to insist that it could still resonate.

When asked about assembling the record, Peffer explained:

“I recorded things where titles or scratch shapes interested me. I was curious what kinds of effects different shape scratches would make. From those recordings I selected things that seemed powerful either because of the pure sound, or the relation to the content of the original uncut version. In the end I went stochastic and lined them up from shortest to longest. Except the last cut on side A which is infinite, and last on B which is two songs merged by me. After I lined my favorite cuts up shortest to longest I thought it sounded good. I realized that if one listens across all of side A especially, your ear learns how to listen to what is going on. Then on Side B those ‘hearing lessons’ are applied to longer form listening on longer cuts. The liner notes describe in a way that a deaf person could see what is going on, too.” (Interview with John Peffer, August 2025.)

Niklas Zimmer, “Marks by hand,” notebook drawings, 2025.

Our exchange also circled back to the question of impulse. I suggested that he sometimes seems like a big brother figure — someone who takes the smashed-up toy out of the bullied child’s hands, holds it up to the light, and shows them: look at it now, see how cool it has become.

Peffer:

“I wanted to know what went down, but to feel it a bit, not just know about it. You know I caressed thousands of those vinyls! I do not think I am ‘helping’ or saving anybody, though. I wanted to get into the skin of a fascist bureaucracy and try to find something good to grow out of its compost. Also did want to figure out how such things go down, to show people things did not have to happen that way, it didn’t work anyway and so on. And then, incidentally, I get to listen to a lot of great South African music as well as what folks in SA heard from elsewhere. So yeah, there is an aspect of wanting to find ways for us all to heal and enjoy the remains.” (Interview with John Peffer, August 2025.)

That impulse, oscillating between forensics, enjoyment, and resistance, produces a practice that is both analytical and raw. He described it further:

“There is also an aspect that was maybe self-entertainment, or hedonistic for me. I just wanted to hear some skipping records. Sometimes when the grooves were good, I forgot the profound social history component. One more thing, and I mention it at the end of part one of the book. I wanted to fuck this archive back that had fucked so many people, including the people who worked there. I wanted to scratch it back, like a punk. Like those Weekly Mail issues in the 80s where they would cross everything out and say they were censored. But holding the bars and scratchings out to the light — even though the bureaucrats put them there in the first place — kicks their own sand in their face. But grievance and accusation accomplish little. Better to say thank you for cutting these, what pretty flowery designs you have made and what gorgeous new tunes you have composed with your angry scribbles.” (Interview with John Peffer, August 2025.)

“I explain the original songs a bit, examine the cuts forensically, then also speak to what I think can be heard in these new monster creations that are not wholly the song nor the censor but a novel thing. Sometimes the context recedes and it becomes concrete music. Sometimes the enormity of the censoring is magnified. Depends on the cuts. You are correct to say it is all very emotional and raw for me. I let it all flow into me, to feel it.” (Interview with John Peffer, August 2025.)

If intentions are not recoverable and context alone cannot close the gap, how then does understanding occur? The answer offered here is durational and situated. Listening is staged as a critical method rather than a solvent; it joins the traces of administration to the grain of voices and media without claiming conclusiveness. Neither naïve audience nor expert critic arrives at a final reading, because the work “occurs” between maker and listener under conditions that are themselves historical. The point is not to fix meaning but to enable rigorous experience.

This take was so different again from the others in its density and intent. The drumming no longer sat as a reactive counterpoint but instead became a continuous, sculptural shaping of the loop. The groove I was playing over was already repetitive to the point of hypnosis, and the drums, rather than marking time seemed to pull time apart, elongating it through saturation.

Stylistically, I was hearing echoes of Milford Graves and Andrew Cyrille, where rhythmic propulsion comes less from a strict pulse and more from a field of interlocking gestures. At the same time, there was something of minimalist process music at play, as in Steve Reich’s early phasing works, where small percussive shifts gradually alter perception even when the underlying material remains mechanically stable.

Unlike the earlier takes, where space and fragmentation were part of the dialogue, this later experiment felt defined by a sense of insistence. I was becoming relentless, layering accents and textures until the sonic field turned almost architectural. At moments, the cymbal wash and tom resonance blur into drones, with sharp snare hits restoring a sense of delineation, though only briefly, before being subsumed again.

Listening to the recording, what was improvisation on top of a loop also became a study in endurance, of persisting in sound against the grain of enforced repetition. If the censor’s scratch created an accidental groove through violence, then here I was both resisting and magnifying that groove; resisting it by overlaying my human variability, magnifying it by leaning into its mechanical inescapability. The paradox felt so alive, if only for a few precious moments: the drums humanised the machine-like loop, but they also exposed its inhuman persistence by sustaining attention to it.

Audio clip: Response III: durational focus—sustained patterning with incremental variations over Peffer’s Side A loop; Trying to track changes in touch and dynamics over time rather than new figures; the form is accumulation.

For me, this take resonates stylistically between avant-garde percussion traditions/ambitions (in my case), minimalist repetition, and the aesthetics of noise, without collapsing into/committing to any one in particular. It remained just what it was: an amateurish, durational act of listening through playing, a material inscription of resistance and intimacy.

There is a trans-Atlantic rhythm to the practice that keeps the work public. Teaching and writing in the United States give way to periods of travel to South Africa to research, meet, embed, and collect; there follows time to live with and analyse the material, to interpret and observe; the results are exhibited, tested, and published, prepared for print and then printed and released in the United States, with circulation and sales organised on both sides of the Atlantic. The cycle repeats, each pass refining the apparatus without sealing it.

The record, therefore, occupies a clear ethical and educational ground. It neither scavenges nor hovers: it commits to institutions, people, and publics, and it returns something made, not merely said. Predictably, such work attracts accusations of neo-colonial “extraction” or a “helicopter” stance. The critique is familiar; it is also inadequate to what is at stake here. The project is educational in the primary sense: it builds capacities for perception and judgment by furnishing access, form, and context where these have been structurally damaged. It deserves support on those terms.

None of this requires special pleading for authorial intention, nor a romance of the curator as sovereign. It requires, instead, responsibility in method and clarity about ends. Notes on Cuts advances both. By insisting that we hear how censorship inscribes itself in media and by recomposing those inscriptions into an intelligible, shareable object, it demonstrates what a historically literate curatorial practice can do: make audible the conditions under which culture is made, constrained, and survived.

Video recording of playing along to the loop on Side A [A].

To détourn the cut is not to undo it, nor to heal it, but to acknowledge its presence and to work with what remains.

The grooves incised by SABC censors are not only scars of repression but also traces that can be replayed, resequenced, and heard otherwise. In assembling these materials, John Peffer has demonstrated how the archive itself can be made to speak against its own violence, how the traces of activities that were meant to silence can be reintroduced and rediscovered as something of value.

“Should we not conclude that censorship at the SABC was a grand failure? Along the lines of what I am characterizing as an absurdity or a farce of bureaucracy, we might also conclude that, in retrospect, the SABC did all this cutting and scraping only for themselves, and to themselves. ‘Just following orders’ slips without friction into predicting orders not ever given [emphasis in original]. They may not always have enjoyed what they were doing; it was done out of fear, and it got under their skin.” (Peffer 2023, p. 11)

The locked groove at the end of Side A makes this paradox audible: the censor’s gesture that was intended to arrest becomes the basis for endless return. My own drumming alongside that loop is one response, not to claim authorship, but to remain present with its inescapability. Again: what was once a mechanism of censorship becomes an occasion for listening, for dialogue, for play.

This project also reopens the circulation of South African music across the Atlantic. Conceived, pressed, and distributed in New York, yet rooted in Johannesburg and Cape Town, the LP enacts the historical exchange between South Africa and the United States in reverse: the archive returns as a record, produced abroad but addressed to those willing to listen here.

What emerges, finally, is less a conventional “album” than a layered object — book, record, archive, testimony. To receive it critically is to resist the urge to reduce it to success or failure, art or document. It asks instead for a practice of listening that can accommodate contradiction: music and non-music, creation and destruction, memory and its erasure.

Audio clip: Response IV: closing variant—return to sparsity and space, over Peffer’s Side A loop; reducing to leave the loop exposed; almost a call-and-response dialogue with it.

To détourn the cut is to listen where listening was refused, to find rhythm in the interruption, to turn damage into duration. It is not repair, but re-use. Not silence, but another beginning.