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Issue #04
Contents
editorial
NEVILLE DUBE
“What shall we do with the tools?”
PALESA MOTSUMI & TARIRO MUDZAMIRI
The Impact of Covid-19 on the Arts in South Africa
Theme Africa Synthesized
CARINA VENTER & STEPHANIE VOS
Africa Synthesized: Editorial Note
GEORGE E. LEWIS
Recharging Unyazi 2005
MICHAEL KHOURY
A Look at Lightning – The Life and Compositions of Halim el-Dabh
KAMILA METWALY
A Sonic letter to Halim El-Dabh
SHANE COOPER
Tape Collage
ADAM HARPER
Shane Cooper’s Tape Collage – a living archive
HANS ROOSENSCHOON
Tape loops: Cataclysm (1980)
STEPHANUS MULLER
Hans Roosenschoon's Cataclysm: message in a bubble or mere spectacular flotsam?
SAZI DLAMINI
Composing with Jurgen Brauninger: 1989-2019
LIZABÉ LAMBRECHTS
The Woodstock Sound System and South African sound reinforcement
CATHY LANE
Synthesizer and portastudio: their roles in the Tigrayan People’s Liberation struggle - an audio essay.
MICHAEL BHATCH
Africa Synthesized: A Sonic Essay
NEO MUYANGA
Afrotechnolomagic before the internet came to town – How electrons made Africans in music zing
NIKLAS ZIMMER
Interspeller (some B-sides)
WARRICK SWINNEY
House on Fire: Sankomota and the art of abstraction
MAËL PÉNEAU
Beatmaking in Dakar: The Shaping of a West-African Hip-hop Sound
ARAGORN ELOFF
Materials of Relation: A Sonic Pedagogy of Non-Mastery
BRIAN BAMANYA
Afrorack
ZARA JULIUS
(Whose) Vinyl in (Which) Africa? A Zoom Fiasco
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Mandela is Dead
&and
Undercommons
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz Speaking
IBUKUN SUNDAY
A Peaceful City
NIKKI SHETH
Mmabolela
PIERRE-HENRI WICOMB
A Composition Machine
SONO-CHOREOGRAPHIC COLLECTIVE
Playing Grounds: a polymodal essay
STELARC & MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
Parasite: A Government of Signs
JURGEN MEEKEL
The Bauhaus Loops
borborygmus
KING SV & MARCO LONGARI
The Black Condition
SIPHELELE MAMBA
Enough is enough
SEGOMOTSO PALESA MOTSUMI
Explaining racism
KHANYISILE MBONGWA
Mombathiseni UnoDolly Wam
PHIWOKAZI QOZA
Choreographies of Protest Performance: 1. The Transgression of Space
TSEPO WA MAMATU
The Colonising Laughter in Leon Schuster’s Mr. Bones and Sweet ’n Short
ANA DEUMERT
On racism and how to read Hannah Arendt
TALLA NIANG
Sembène Ousmane
MAVAMBO CHAZUNGUZA
Sacred Sonic Cosmos
GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN
The Saharan WhatsApp Series - an Experiment in Immediacy
BEN EYES
Cross-cultural collaboration in African Electronica
STEVEN CRAIG HICKMAN
The Listening of Horror
MICHAEL C COLDWELL
The Noise made by Ghosts
GABRIEL GERMAINE DE LARCH
I will not be erased
frictions
JESÚS SEPÚLVEDA
Viaje a Tánatos
KATYA GANESHI
From Beyond the World of Dead Sirens
RIAAN OPPELT
(Ultra) Lockdown
SINDISWA BUSUKU
Let’s Talk Kaffir
JOHAN VAN WYK
Man Bitch
MAAKOMELE R. MANAKA
Four Indigenous Poems
claque
KOLEKA PUTUMA
Language & Storytelling: On Zöe Modiga’s Inganekwane
LINDELWA DALAMBA
After the Aftermath: Recovery?
ATHI MONGEZELELI JOJA
Uninterrogated Phallophilia
HILDE ROOS
Sicula iOpera – a raised fist?
PAUL ZISIWE
19 Feedbacks
TSELISO MONAHENG
How to build a Scene
WAMUWI MBAO
Struggle Sounds
MKHULU MAPHIKISA
Short but not sweet: Skeptical Erections and the Black Condition
MBALI KGAME
Tales from The UnderWorld
ekaya
STEPHANIE VOS
The Exhibition of Vandalizim – Improvising Healing, Politics and Film in South Africa
MARIETJIE PAUW, GARTH ERASMUS & FRANCOIS BLOM
Improvising Khoi’npsalms
off the record
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Lewis Nkosi – treasured memory
LEWIS NKOSI
Jazz in Exile
EUGENE SKEEF
Chant of Divination for Steve Biko
BRENDA SISANE
How I fell in love with music
SAM MATHE
Skylarks
THOKOZANI MHLAMBI
Early Sound Recordings in Africa: Challenges for Future Scholarship
MARIO PISSARRA
Everywhere but nowhere: reflections on DV8 magazine
DEREK DAVEY
Live Jimi Presley 1990-1995
HERMAN LATEGAN
Pentimento
ARGITEKBEKKE
AFRIKAAPS compIete script deel 3
feedback
PHILLIPPA YAA DE VILLIERS
An urgency to action
PABLO VAN WETTEN
Sort of a ramble
the selektah
PONE MASHIANGWAKO
Artists' Prayer - A Tribute to Motlhabane Mashiangwako
hotlynx
shopping
SHOPPING
Purchase or listen
contributors
the back page
MICHAEL TAUSSIG
Unpacking My Library: An Experiment in the Technique of Awakening
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #04
  • galleri

SONO-CHOREOGRAPHIC COLLECTIVE

Playing Grounds: a polymodal essay

SONO-CHOREOGRAPHIC COLLECTIVE

Coming from practices of sculpture, music and dance, we are Kerstin Ergenzinger, Bnaya Halperin-Kaddari and Kiran Kumar, a collective for transdisciplinary art and research. At the core of our collaborative practice is play. We play intentionally to seek, affirm and share a life-ness, which we see as so important to our worlds today. We play our self-made research instruments, and also our human body-mind. We play attentively to create and sustain encounters for something subtle to emerge. We call these encounters Sono-Choreographic playgrounds, because on the playground we can be playful rather than precious about seeking out subtlety. Our playgrounds are interspaces of installation, performance, instrumental music and writing practices. Our playgrounds are also collective spaces where personal encounters of subtlety might expand into shared experiences of nuance. And it is in this sharing of nuanced co-presences that we locate our urgent resistance to the excesses of modernity, to tendencies of higher, stronger and faster. Our resistance is micropolitical in that it proposes subtle modes of sensing. It is also playful in proposing poly-sensory playgrounds to tease out more than monistic ways of sensing, experiencing, knowing and therefore relating-with our worlds.

KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 2

This poly-modal essay is a non exhaustive peek into our work, our desktops and drawers, our lab, kitchen and garden spaces. What follows is an expanding portrait of our spinning musical instruments, even as they are growing.

KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 3
KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 4
KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 5

Keeping the notion of play at the core of our joint artistic practice, we play research instruments in their making. Our playgrounds are sites in which we freely explore and experiment with these instruments. Here we introduce a new family of electromagnetic musical spin-tops, as they play out their energies.

KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 6

As we play each particular of these idiosyncratic instruments, we paradoxically evoke a vast and vague global phenomenon of the spin-top that has no single origin. This paradox invites us to add our own interpretation to it, giving this old instrument a different spin. To research the spin-top’s musicality is also to rehearse it; the practice of spinning alters our perceptions, triggering lines of unexpected relations and carving familiar ones. Each spin of these electromagnetic muscle-powered motors sends signals of just a few hundred microvolts; subtly yet immediately and generously dissipating their charge in every direction.

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KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 8

Our spin-tops sense gravitational forces and also cosmic forces. A tall claim, perhaps, but it’s about being tuned into these phenomena, simultaneously playing and being played by the forces of flight. As elegantly spinning discs they evoke celestial bodies through their ideals of balance and circularity. Yet they are constantly failed by friction. By the very initial impulse of injection, they are destined to imperfection, spinning inevitably towards a fatal wobble. It is precisely this elasticity between profound and profane that affords them their capacity for poetry. Our kinaesthetic poetry machines subvert the motors of modernity.

One of our spin-tops, with a double row of magnets tuned as a minor third, always spins out lullabies. The spin invites onlookers to an object of wo/ander; the spin invites listeners to fall into a shared sleep.

We are listening to entropy as it unfolds. The spin-tops become generators: they generate sounds; these sounds generate ideas which provoke us to experiment further; experiments generate different sets of sono-aesthetic conditions: low-fi and sci-fi. Within an aquarium for instance, a drop of ink injected into water spreads into a slow-spinning dissolution: here we quantify (a drop), amplify (a drift) and lullaby (a dream?).

By playing these instruments we can experience processes of discrete continuity, a cut through spacetime at a specific point along the spin-top. Their launch is a charge, a continuous acceleration. Their spin is the dissipation of energy in a continuous deceleration; these flows are cut. The emerging magnetic field is a disruption which we pick up with coils. When blowing onto a spin-top through an aluminium straw, the flow of air is interrupted by the topography of the top, shaping this truncated stream into a wailing soft siren. Ripples are produced, both acoustically and electrically, translating the changing rate of spin into a descending tone. Always in relation to the top’s diameter, to its partitions, sounds of differentiated durations are melting together the continuous and the discrete. Curiously, while we can only perceive phenomena as flow, their making relies on quantization.

Playing a musical spin-top is a multifaceted thing. You take the custom-made wooden launcher with one hand and place the top’s central brass-pole through the launcher’s two holes. With your other hand you slide the fine, strong kite string through the hole in the spin-top’s pole. When enough thread has passed through the hole, so as not to be pulled out by the initial tilt, you start turning the pole with two fingers of your hand, weaving the thread around the pole. Your other forefinger and thumb guide the string while carefully keeping it tensed. You can control the shape of this ‘bob’, knowing that during the launch it will go through the exact same reverse course. When the thread is all wound up, the ring at its end reaches the main body of the launcher and is blocked by it.

Now you place the charged spin-top on the middle of a ceramic plate in front of you: One hand around the handle of the launcher, the thumb at the top of the groove counterbalancing and keeping it centred. With the other hand gripped through the ring at the end of the string you begin pulling. Starting slowly but gradually building momentum and speed, you must keep the launcher-hand very steady, your arm muscles balancing the pull from the thread that is now augmented by growing centrifugal forces. The pull ends suddenly when the thread is all un-wound and in that moment your launcher-arm must immediately re-adjust to this change in order to keep the launcher as horizontal as possible. At that very moment, you lift your launcher-hand as swiftly and vertically as possible to release the spin-top.

While you pick up the turning magnetic field with the copper-coil you closely feel the pulse of the induced current in your hand, simultaneously listening to its amplified sound through the space. By playing this instrument your whole body becomes attuned to each and every one of the top’s turns and wobbles. You sense, see and listen to the effects of gravity and the play of centrifugal forces.

KERSTIN ERGENZINGER 12

There are moments you forget that the spin will ever end.

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PIERRE-HENRI WICOMB
STELARC & MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
© 2023
Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute