ESTHER MARIE PAUW

An introduction to the Africa Open Improvising collective, 2020-2023

The Africa Open Improvising collective was established in March 2020 and exists as a gathering place for musicians exploring aspects of free sonic improvisation. The collective is affiliated to the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation, at Stellenbosch University. During periods of COVID-19 isolation, the collective played in weekly sessions of online and hybrid formats, thereby engaging with and creating new music with musicians from national and international locations, whilst navigating online technologies as creative tools.^{[1]The following published text presents observations about online technological experiments by this collective. Pauw, Esther Marie. 2021a. Music-improvising practices amidst social distancing and lockdown in Hunter-Hüsselman, Maryke. 2021. ‘Music-improvising practices amidst social distancing and lockdown’. In Research at Stellenbosch University 2020: Special Covid-19 Edition, ed. Maryke Hunter-Hüsselman, with Jorisna Bonthuys, Anneke Potgieter, Whitney Prins, Jennifer de Beer, Aasima Gaffoor, p 81. Stellenbosch: Stellenbosch University Division for Research Development. Accessed 21 July 2023. online.fliphtml5.com.}

As the pandemic isolation period drew to an end, the founding players of the collective (Garth Erasmus, Pierre-Henri Wicomb and Esther Marie Pauw) gave a public performance to an audience at Pieter Okkers House, 7 Joubert Street, Stellenbosch, the home of the Africa Open Institute. The event celebrated a return to in-person playing for this collective. A video of the live event, together with written texts, reflections and artwork culminated in early December 2021 in a piece for herri, which can be read here.

In 2022 and 2023, the collective met regularly at Pieter Okkers House. Aspects such as porous playership (with anyone welcome to play), social communality and trust (that enables music experimentation), an eagerness to refine musicianship through improvising (an endeavour expressed by players of the collective), open audience policy (with walk-in audiences, researchers and visual artists welcomed) and recordings made during improvising sessions that are archived and disseminated online (with potential audiences on Soundcloud and the Internet Archive) characterise this collective. The collective has emerged as a connective body, linking musicians and artists across distinctly different training backgrounds (self-taught, classical, jazz, noise music, experimental, composition-based, etc.). These musicians and artists are each located within networks that can broadly be described as ‘social experimental audio’, a term used by Francisco López in a curatorial essay to the 2020 exhibition titled ‘Audiosphere’^{[2]See Audiosphere, pages 14-27}. A theme of connection, articulated as ‘collectives as connectives’, quoting filmmaker Aryan Kaganof who set up some of the collectives’ collaborations, has emerged as a descriptive for the Africa Open Improvising collective.

‘Connectives’ as creationary notion include possibilities of subsequent improvising responses, with reference to xenochronic over-layering and co-improvising that Ben Watson implemented for radio broadcasts of improvised music.

‘Collectives as Connectives’: AMM-All Stars

Early in 2023, while on a visit to Cape Town, percussionist Peter Baxter and poet Melanie Hufkie of the London-based AMM-All Stars collective collaborated with Africa Open Improvising. The meeting was arranged by Aryan Kaganof who had engaged the AMM-All Stars leader and keyboard player, Ben Watson, to contribute a text to herri, Issue 8.^{[3]Ben Watson is a former writer for The Wire. Watson also wrote monographs on the free improviser musician, Derek Bailey, and the rock musician, Frank Zappa. Watson (aka ‘Out to Lunch’) currently presents two radio station programmes in London, with aesthetics and politics closely related to the AMM (Association of Musical Marxists). His shows comprise two radio programmes, ‘Late Lunch with Out To Lunch’ on Resonance FM (resonancefm.com) and ‘The OTL Show’ on Soho Radio (sohoradiolondon.com).} Kaganof filmed the five AOI and AMM-All Stars musicians at play (Erasmus, Pauw, Wicomb and Baxter, Hufkie) and released a short film, titled slave bell quintet.

A recording, edited by Wicomb, is also available on Soundcloud.

The collaboration had several outcomes which attest to the significance of collaborative work that shares music exchanges to create new music and that helps to unearth memories about musicians’ practices. The outcomes are described below.

A week after the AOI&AMM-All Stars collaboration, Ben Watson, who presents two radio shows in London, broadcast Kaganof’s sound edit of the quintet’s improvisation in Stellenbosch. The full programme is available at archive.org. The programme description for the 17-minute broadcast (of the collaboration) reads as follows:

02:08 AOI All-Stars “Every Thought is Debased When Expressed in Words” soundtrack of film by Aryan Kaganof  feat. Garth Erasmus – alto sax; Esther Marie Pauw – flute; Pierre-Henri Wicomb – piano; M. L. Hufkie – war cries & Afrikaans poetry; Peter Baxter – percussion (Vimeo 797190194) African Open Institute, Stellenbosch, S. A. 7-ii-2023 17:18

A week later, Ben Watson (aka ‘Out to Lunch’) encouraged the AMM-All Stars to ‘play like Pierre-Henri’, and they improvised a piece that was broadcast on the radio programme of 22 February 2023. The programme description of Wicomb’s piece read as follows: 20:45 “Tribute to Pierre-Henri Wicomb” with Korg synth by Out To Lunch i-2019 7:50

Following on from this interchange and creation of new music in response to Wicomb’s (prepared piano) style, Ben Watson approached Erasmus and Pauw for examples of their former duo recordings. Watson subsequently broadcast several samples of this duo’s music on Soho Radio, an example of which is on sohoradiolondon.com.

In the spirit of xenochronic layering of tracks from remote sources, Watson used one of the Erasmus-Pauw tracks, originally from a series titled ‘Overdub/Oorblyfsels’ (2020). Watson overlayed an AMM-All Stars electric guitar player’s solo track over the former (i.e. Crook over Erasmus&Pauw). The result was what he called an ‘imprint of fizz in Stellenbosch’, available at archive.org, with programme description to this broadcasted track as follows:

AMM All-Stars “Our Glistening Ooze” AK/OTL on Easter Sunday 2023 4:08 Xenochronic AMM All-Stars (Eleanor Crook – electric guitar “Reply to OTL’s Piano” 7-ii-2023 0:27>>10:59; Garth Erasmus – clarinet, Esther Marie Pauw – alto flute “Overdub I (Oorblyfsels)” 2012) “Imprint of Fizz in Stellenbosch” 10:19.

The exchanges continued. With an upload onto Internet Archive of three new improvisations by Erasmus, Pauw and Wicomb on 16 May 2023 (archive.org), Watson responded by xenochronic overlayering for a programme broadcast on 24 May 2023, available here. Watson describes the programme, which includes an in-person discussion as follows:

With the Late Lunch houseband Ammas on a two-week break from its Betsey Trotwood Friday lunchtime residency, Ben resorts to “xenochrony”, combining contributions from musicians scattered across the globe. The Africa Open Improvising Trio (Garth Erasmus – flute, Esther Marie Pauw – flute, Pierre-Henri Wicomb – piano) contribute three pieces, which are combined with OTL’s Korg synth, Splash’n’Klang and guitar, and also with bass by Jair-Rohm Parker Wells and drums by Guy Evans. Peter Baxter’s percussive responses to these pieces become a dialogue between OTL and Colin Shepherd from Berlin about what ails mainstream science – referencing plasma scientist Hannes Alfven and biologist Lyn Margulis – with subversive synth courtesy Graham Davis. “Open Letter to the Offended” includes a contribution from Murray the Dog in Goring-on-Sea.

With a subsequent documentation uploaded onto Internet Archive by Erasmus, Pauw and Van Zyl (Track ‘a’ from archive.org), Watson implemented overlayering (with Watson playing piano and guitar) and broadcast the new track in London on Friday 26 May 2023 (archive.org). Watson describes this new track as follows:

Africa Open Improvisation + Out To Lunch (Garth Erasmus – ghôrrah bow, aeolian pipes; Jacques van Zyl – electronic neural networks; Esther Marie Pauw – C-flute, G-flute Stellenbosch, S. A. iv-2023; plus overdub by Out To Lunch – piano, acoustic guitar Somers Town 22-v-2023) “Disembodied Sensitivities” 26:51.

Finally, for this report, the Internet Archive files of the two recordings made on 25 April 2023, with five musicians playing (and Antoinette Theron’s first time vocalising with the collective), can be heard here.

For the ‘Late Lunch’ show on London’s Resonance fm radio, Ben Watson used both tracks, some with overlayering by AMM-All Stars (‘Ammas’) players. He sent the following pre-release description for the programme titled ‘All Divisions through the Grinder’ (29 May, on email):

This week Ben continues to mine Stellenbosch in South Africa for sounds relevant to his brief (non-idiomatic, anti-semiotic and unpredictable), with Esther Marie Pauw on flute, Pierre-Henri Wicomb on prepared piano, Antionette Theron on vocals, John Pringle on percussion and Jacques van Zyl on electronics. Their improvisations are combined with those of Ammas at the Betsey Trotwood: Nick Lubran and Dave Black on guitars, Graham Davis on synths, Out To Lunch on Yamaha keys, Peter Baxter on percussion. The show ends with “Gamma’s Poem”, Out To Lunch’s Word Jazz performed by the late and very much missed Paul Gamble, SF distributor and larger-than-life Philip K. Dickhead. The radio programme broadcast is available here.

Other than contributing to the creation of new music and the development of improvisers’ creative styles, these music exchanges frame email and online conversations that Garth Erasmus and Ben Watson held at the time. Garth wrote that he was pleased to finally meet ‘the’ Ben Watson of The Wire, with London-based Watson a writer that Erasmus had read in the 1980s whilst self-educating and developing his free improvisation music style in South Africa. Erasmus had no former training in classical or jazz music and was not acknowledged as a musician in ‘recognised’ classical/jazz circles, and instead found his connections to his Khoi history through the sounding music bow (the ghÔrrah), a self-taught saxophone style, and the building of various instruments-as-sounding-installations. Erasmus also connected with the expressive spirit found amongst players like Derek Bailey, about whom Ben Watson was to write decades later.

In the email exchanges, Watson noted to Erasmus that Bailey had played some of Erasmus’ solo cassettes at his London night club intervals, and thereafter remarked to Watson about ‘the guy from South Africa’ who sent him cassettes. Watson remarked (to Erasmus, in 2023) that some of the solo-improvised music by Erasmus was ‘too sparse and free’ for his younger ears, but that ‘now’, several decades later, he could appreciate Erasmus’ playing.

These (2023) email exchanges (following on the first collaboration at Africa Open Improvising) had the outcome of bringing into focus the memories of Garth Erasmus, thereby highlighting times of political-musical exclusion, with singular efforts by artists like Erasmus to converse internationally, picking up conversations from The Wire, which he received from friends who sent him copies by post. Furthermore, by mailing cassettes to Bailey for comment, as sent by a musician who was, on the home front, unrecognised for his artistic insight, endeavour and daring, Erasmus positioned himself as an autodidact, who would be years ahead of his geographical, political and sonic times.

Within the Africa Open Improvising collective, the emergence of memories like these attest to the importance of playing collaboratively in the present, also to unearth the past, and likewise attest to the importance of articulating memories to current readers and audiences. Erasmus and Pauw hope to present a paper at the SASRIM (South African Society for Research in Music) conference of August 2023, in which they will speak about the after-effects of the collaboration between Africa Open Improvising and its meeting with Baxter, Hufkie, and Ben Watson, focusing on the ‘xenochronic’ exchanges (or ‘strange-time exchanges’) between musicians, and memories.

Aryan Kaganof filmed the collective at play on several occasions. Kaganof’s presence, keen attention to sonic detail and creation of connections around this collective with other collectives are force energies that are much appreciated.

Sound files available at: soundcloud & archived

The image over which this page floats is “Insider Cramp” MS Paint by Out To Lunch 20-ii-2023 (image for an episode of Late Lunch with Out to Lunch: Puzzles laid into the future history.