Sassquatch - The Origin of the Sass
So here, the day before my "From Sass Africa with Love" exhibition, is the last part of the audio side of the project.
This mix revolves around the music that inspired me to start DJing in the first place. These bands from early this decade from New York (!!!, The Rapture) as well as ones from Washington DC (Q and not U, Black Eyes) as well as older acts I discovered (The Slits, ESG) first got it into my head that it might be awesome to mix songs together for people to dance to. There are a few exceptions (Sticky Antlers, History Invades) that came along once I'd started DJing, but for the most part this mix is a compilation of much of what inspired me to become the Sassquatch.
Well I hope some people enjoy this mix, given the chaotic style of most of the songs, and the fact that none of them are really dance music, the mixing is pretty shambolic. Still, I'm happy with how this mix turned out, and I'm happy to have it as a document of the catalysts that got me DJing.
This mix is made up entirely of songs released by acts from around my extended hometown of Gauteng, South Africa. Recorded between 2005 and 2008, these songs are parts of the soundtrack for one of the happiest periods of my life. A period where, quite unexpectedly, small pockets of friends strewn between Pretoria and Johannesburg started writing music that was unlike anything that had come out of South Africa before.
Dancing to these songs, DJing them out and spending dozens of nights seeing them performed live, these songs have been the catalysts for almost all the moments I've found myself most proud to be a boy, born in Preotria in 1983.
So I'm writing this from my girlfriend's lounge in London. I've been over in the UK for 2 weeks now, been spending a fair amount of time preparing for the Sense Summer Art Fair which opens on Friday. Been spending a whole lot more of my time over here watching a bunch of incredible live acts which I'll probably write all about once I'm back in South Africa next week. For now I've got to tie up the last few loose ends for my exhibition...
So yeah, with so little time to sort out the last few details, tie up any loose ends at work, and work as much on exhibition stuff as I can while still on Mama Afrika, I won't be posting much before I leave. I do hope I'll be able to post the last 2 mixes for the project, and complete my half finished posted from last month.
Some of these songs were part of amazing moments for me at the Sovereign Academy at some point. Destroying with NYPC's "Decend" after playing my first entirely beat-mixed set at Sovereign 3 in early 2006. Then at Sovereign 10 in mid 2007, being in the middle of the Capitol Theatre dancefloor the first time King of Town dropped his remix of The Tutus' Gauteng-dance-anthem "She Hangs". These songs and these moments are etched into my brain as some of the most special memories of what went down over the course of the Sovereign Academy's 15 party run.
At the same time there are songs on this mix that were never played at the Sovereign Academy. Some of them I came across after Graduation (Isochronous), some of them would only have gone down at Sovereign in my dreams (These New Puritans).
But in spite of some of these songs never been played at the parties, this, the 3rd mix in "From Sass Africa with Love", is called "Selected Sounds of the Sovereign Academy". Unlike the 4th mix, this collection is formed from older songs I love.
Wow! That's like 105682 times as much as the 0 posts I made between May 08 and April 09! I'm kinda proud of myself.
Over the past month, from dragging "So Many Animal Calls" out from a cold blog-grave and re-animating it into a kind of reluctantly self-promoting zombie blog I've blogged about a bunch of stuff. Here's a little recap:
R: You recently did a collaboration with Kidofdoom at Ramfest. What was the idea behind that show? What exactly did you do?
B: Yeah, it was too cool - I had the best time. The show was the final chapter in a trilogy of performances called Trajectory.
The Trajectory series was basically our first prototype for creating a narrative audio/visual performance. We first came up with the idea during our first tour of Cape Town in September 2006. We were planning the first Sovereign Halloween party, and I dunno how, but we got it into our heads that the band would dress up as the Ghost Busters and that I'd VJ with them as the Stay Puffed Demon. Unfortunately I couldn't find a keytar by then, and it was actually only by Oppikoppi 2008 that we finally got to play together for the first time.
Basically how the Trajectory sets worked was, the band would come up with a set list. Then the lighting guy Peter Rodda and I would work through the set, breaking it up into sequences and then giving each of them a mood and a colour pallet. From this template and the soundtrack I'd then figure out a narrative and present it to the rest of the team. Once we had everything finalised I'd sit and animate all the clips we'd need, we'd rehearse everything and then throw it all down on stage.
Live I was using my keytar to trigger the video and animation for the visuals using the white keys to trigger clips, the black keys to turn effects on and off and the controls on the neck of the keytar to manipulate these effects.
Trajectory III (like the rest of the Trajectory performances) was about space travel. The "trajectory" of each set was dictated by the music, and the idea behind the lighting and visuals was that they'd take the audience on this journey with the band. It was a pretty abstract narrative, and I don't for a second fool myself into thinking that anyone actually followed it the way I wrote it, but I think that's pretty great. We just wanted to offer people something new, something more immersive than just a show, and if there were some people that formed their own story of what was happening then that's awesome.
Kidofdoom - Son - Trajectory 02 - Earthdance festival - 13 September 2008
So remember how is was talking about how I'm gonna be doing the exhibition in London? Well I made a kind of trailer for the piece "From Sass Africa with Love" which I'll be exhibiting there. Here it is:
Sassquatch - The Origin of the Sass
