FROM SASS AFRICA WITH LOVE PT4: THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL WAS A SOUL TRAIN

Sassquatch - From Sass Africa with Love 4

"From Sass Africa With Love" is a project I'll be working on for the next two months. It's difficult to explain what it will be, but it'll all be going up here as each phase is completed, so I suppose in the long run I won't need to explain what it is, it will just be.

For now, it's 4 CDs. Compilations of music that I'll mix together to try give international audiences an idea of what I'm about. Originally I sat through my entire bag of CDs and picked out the 55 songs that I thought best represented what the Sass was all about. This too long list was made up of Dischord post-hardcore, 70ies disco, Valerie dance music and a whole bunch of songs by South African friends. Here's what it looked like:

So I set myself the very ambitious task of trying to combine all these songs into a single mix of ultimate Sassness. After spending far too long trying to combine these disparate sounds I was sitting with an hour and a half of undefined, noisy, disco-sludge. Which was pretty depressing and lame...

But then on Saturday morning Oh Crapp! threw three fantastic new songs at me that I just had to incorporate into the mix. At this point I realised I needed to break the mix up and here's how I've decided to do it:

From Sass Africa with Love 1 - Origin of the Sass
* Old stuff that got me wanting to start DJing in the first place
From Sass Africa with Love 2 - The Critical Hits
* All the South African bands that have been making kids dance here over the past few years.
From Sass Africa with Love 3 - Selected Sounds of the Sovereign Academy
* A bunch of my favourite songs from when I started DJing to when we ended Sovereign.
From Sass Africa with Love 4 - The Light at the end of the tunnel was a Soul Train.
* Songs that give me hope for the future of danceable rock and roll.

To say that I was disappointed by the direction "indie dance" chose to follow would be a massive understatement.

I started DJing because of bands Q and not U, The Rapture and Moving Units. Those bands seemed to be doing the most "wrong" thing possible, been rock bands but making dance music. It was awesome. Hearing !!! proclaim "There's No Fucking Rules Dude" for the first time had me so excited about the future of people making rock music hidden in dance music, I wanted to scream.

But unfortunately for me, I landed up hating most of the music that was born out of the 21st century's unprecedented acceptance of the once completely separate dance and rock worlds getting it on. While fantastic bands like Friendly Fires, New Young Pony Club and Delorean brought out wonderful, warm dance songs, these bands were few and far between. Instead, the norm became paint by numbers production of banging electro and krunk, leaving me constantly frustrated at not finding enough good new music to play out.

But things are changing. This mix is about that. It's about a warm shining light at the end of a dark tunnel of in-human soul-less-ness.

It's not like this is a compilation of entirely new songs, but there are some in there (La Roux, Two Door Cinema Club). There's a song by a new incarnation of one of the first bands that got me dancing (Men - who are two thirds of Le Tigre). There are songs (Anoraak, Hot Chip) that first gave me hope for a brighter future. And there's a song by friends from my backyard (The Tutus and King of Town) that makes me incredibly gratefully to be born where I was, when I was.

I hope you enjoy this mix, and I'm looking forward to travelling back in time and putting the rest of the collection together for you!

It's wierd how things work out:

In my last post from 24 May 2008 I wrote about two videos (Johnny Foreigner's "Eyes Wide Terrified" and Errors' "Salut! France") that I was watching on repeat.

A few days later I was suddenly informed I'd be flying to in the start of July. When I phoned my girl to let her know the cool news she was all like "now you can see Johnny Foreigner!" which obviously would have been awesome, but seemed unlikely as I was only going to be there for ten days and the odds of a globe trotting band like Jo Fo happening to be in London while I was there seemed pretty damn unlikely.

But sometimes (like when Q and not U for no apparent reason at all came to SA in 2004 weeks before breaking up) the universe seems to love hooking me up with my favorite rock and roll.

Jo Fo did play London, I got to see them and it was awesome awesome awesome. This would also have been a pretty neat coincidence (given that I'd been on the other side of the world, blogging about these kids without even an incing that I'd be at one of their shows a fortnight later) but the night landed up been even stranger.

Before Johnny Foreigner played, i was hanging out with their drummer, Junior. We were watching the opening act, a Scottish band I'd never heard of called Dananananaykroyd. The perfect compliment to Jo Fo's abrasive pop awesomeness, Dananananaykroyd's 2 drummers, 2 guitarists, bassist and vocalist smashed, strummed and screamed their way through 30 something of the best minutes of my life so far.

Between smiling too much to talk, I managed to ask Junior if he'd heard of this "really cool Scottish band called Errors". Junior looked at more for half a second and was like "Yeah. That's the drummer." pointing to one half of Dananananaykroyd's drumming duo.

So basically (without even knowing I'd be out of the country at the time) I wrote about been in love with two bands in far away countries and somehow, 2 weeks later, I was dancing to the sounds of their members ripping awesomeness out of instruments right before my eyes.

Sometimes life is just too damn cool to be real.

Shazam!!!

*POOF!!!*

... and like that I'm back!

So it's been almost a year since I made any kind of animal calls.

The reason I'm back is I'm planning on re-incarnating this dead blog to become a kind of single document of what I've been doing over the past 5 years. I'm currently planning a trip to the UK and I'm hoping to try play some shows while I'm over, but I really don't quite know how to sell myself to any promoters over there, given that what I've been doing has gone almost entirely un-documented.

So yeah, hopefully So Many Animal calls will serve as quite a good focal point for me bring together various relics of the parties I've been throwing, the creatures I've been drawing, the visuals I've been animating and the discos I've been DJing.

This new agenda for SMAC means I'll need to start writing quite differently. In the past I've written as though I'm speaking to a friend that knows exactly what I'm talking about. This made sense, because who other than my friends would be paying attention to what I had to say anyway.

Obviously that's gonna have to change, but hopefully the photos, flyers, videos and songs I post will speak for themselves and i won't have to do to much explaining. But in honor of the old Animal Calls, let me do one last bit of writing were I don't need to give any back story or explanation; if for no-one other than myself, here's a quick recap of what's gone down since I last wrote anything here...

* We ended Sovereign Academy!
15 parties and 3 years down the line, Matt and I killed Sovereign Academy off with an awesome graduation party. I'll be sure to do a post about the whole thing soon.

* Unit R lost their drummer to the States and have yet to perform live since.

* The New Loud Rockets broke up. RIP.

* The Incredible 5 Men, 3 Missing broke up. RIP

* Us Kids Know pretty much broke up, reformed, played a show and changed their name to "Sad Swamps".

* Paul, under his King of Town moniker produced some fantastic remixes!
He was asked to do a mix of "Moon Song" by UK cosmic-core innovators "They Came From The Stars, I saw them.". The vinyl release of this mix was backed by Holy Ghost, which is just too cool. Even cooler was that French Label "Tiger Sushi" did a vinyl release for his epic remix of Desmond and the Tutus' "Kiss on the Cheek"!!!

* I discovered amazing new music been made in South Africa.
The emergence of bands like Sticky Antlers, New Holland, The Arrows, Pink Noise, The Plastics, Tinto, The Shadow Club and Organized Distortion have gotten me even more excited about things over here.

* It turned out there's this absurdly cool DIY record label running out of Pretoria!
"The Kringy Label" had released dozens of hand made, individually numbered singles, EPs, albums, DVDs, toys and accessories right under my nose I never had a clue.

* A single new DJ emerged in this time!
His name is NathanScottPhillips and he's great.

* Yesterday's Pupil independently released his debut album.

* Desmond and the Tutus finally released their massively anticipated debut album.

* I stopped playing shows with Johnny Neon.

* I started playing shows with Kidofdoom. Will post about this.

* I got a job!
At 24, for the fist time in my life, i got a 9 - 5 job working as the creative director for YOTV.

* I turned old.
I had my 25th birthday in December, I don't know if I'm still allowed to call myself a kid anymore.

* Almost simultaneously ALL the counter-cultural coolness in my neighborhood curled up and died.
While a year ago I'd have argued that Melville was one of the most exciting places in Johannesburg, it's now quite the opposite. Within a few months Canned Applause (the countries only independent music shop), Ke Ai (the coolest asian pop culture store in the city) and Tokyo Star (the club I played every Thursday for 3 years) all closed their doors, leaving Melville as nothing more than a street full of restaurants and curio shops. The only conceivable upside of this is that Johannesburg now finally has a Mexican restaurant. Last month Cafe Mexico opened in old home of Tokyo Star.

* A new club called the Woods opened in Newtown.
My main man Matt Suttner started throwing a series of parties there called Pixel Pop. With a projector above the dance floor and a screen behind the DJ both, Pixel Pop nights have become the closest thing jozi has to a regular VJ party with makes me very very happy.

* Griet got born!
My friends Dom, Joe and Ryk started up an artist management and event design company called Griet. With Kidofdoom, Isochronous, Yesterday's Pupil, Unit R and myself forming the company's roster of acts, it's a pretty awesome little family to be a part of. They've already done some awesome stuff, and even more awesome awesomeness is sure to follow.

* After Sovereign I took a very long break from events, only throwing one other event last year.
It was a night called Electric Affair and it was the very first disco revival party in the city. It was super cool and we're hopping to do another one soon.

* Last Saturday I threw a party with the Griet kids.
Called "Now It's On" it was a kind of prototype for the party we'll be doing as the follow up to Sovereign Academy. It was a ridiculously fun - I'll do a full post about it soon.

I think that's pretty much it... Oh! In my last post from 24 May 2008 I wrote about two videos (Johnny Foreigner's "Eyes Wide Terrified" and Errors' "Salut! France") that I was watching on repeat. About a week ... actually, this post is far to long already, I'll save my tale of the universe been awesome to me for next time!

Keep it real kids!

B

Current obsessions ...

This isn't any news about going ons over here in South Africa, but I've decided to share the two most exciting videos I've come across in a while. I've been pretty much obsessed with both songs and I hope that you will like them to :)

ERRORS - SALUT! FRANCE


This isn't a new song, or a new band, but it was all total news to me when a friend recommended them a couple weeks back.

Errors are on Mogwai's awesome "Rock Action" label. You can definitely pick up that the band have obviously been influenced by the Glasgow instrumentalists, but what I love about Errors is that, to me anyway, they seem like Ratatat and Kraftwerk got mangled in a head on collision. Too rad.

JOHNNY FOREIGNER - EYES WIDE TERRIFIED


Johnny Foreigner are a band I've had the pleasure of following from 3 kids churning out fantastic fuzzed out demos to an act that look set to release an album of perfect, polished pop-core that's sure to be very well received.

I remember walking into Canned Applause one afternoon early last year and Ri telling me he'd found my new favourite band. Needless to say the band's frantic interplay of guy/girl sing/scream/talk dynamics alone sold. Add the fact they were musically bouncing around between all my favorite rackets and it was love at first sound. Ri wasn't exagerating, he had indeed discovered my new favourite band.

"Eye's Wide Terrified" is the first single from their forthcoming full length "Waited Up Till It was Light" which the band flew from Birmingham to New York to record. If Eyes Wide is anything to go by the move to record in New York has seen them polish up on the production side a lot, something I was worried would happen, but I now think might serve them very well and I think there's a very good chance this will be my favourite album of 08! UPDATE - 4 May 2009: It WAS my favourite album of 08!!!

It-was-awesome!

Sovereign Academy + Cape Town = FUCK YEAH!



"The Final Fieldtrip", the last ever Sovereign Academy party in Cape Town was hands down one of the coolest parties our gang as ever thrown. We were so happy with the massive turnout of kids and were even more stoked with just how much effort they put into dressing up Animal Power.

I just wanna say thanks so much to Blaise for making the night happen, to Righard for the great posters, to Toby at Fittees for awesome t-shirts, to Johan for the car, to Anja for been the best girl ever and to the whole Sovereign family for the past two and a half years of "fuck yeahs". I can't believe it's almost over...

The super-rad kids over at "We Are Awesome" did an great job of documenting the night... ... see We Are Awesome's entire Final Fieldtrip gallery here.

The Final Fieldtrip!

We're coming back down to Cape Town!

We kinda promised that after Halloween there would only be one more Sovereign, but after seeing how cool The Assembly is and how much we loved the last Sovereign in CT we had to throw one last party down there too. Here's some stuff to get you into Animal Power mode!

Sassquatch - The Final Fieldtrip

Kidofdoom and Yesterday's Pupil - Minor dis n remix

Phosphenes

This past weekend my favorite Cape Town based band came up to Gauteng to launch their first album.

It's a pretty absurdly cool disc called Phosphenes, which the band (having 3 producers in amongst it's 4 members) recorded and produced themselves. Genre wise the album incorporates folk, punk-funk, electro and space influences into something incredibly diverse and original, a trait that even further exaggerated by the fact that lead vocal duties are split between three of the members.

Here're two of my favorites:

Unit R - Daft
Unit R - Scared

Live the band really kill and both the Joburg and Pretoria Launch parties were too fun. With set-lists that seem more like they were assembled by a DJ than a band, building up and breaking down, along their way to working the crowd up into a frenzy, Unit R are probably the closes thing South Africa has to a live dance band.

I suck...

... at running this thing.
6 months and no follow up to the first post, what a joke.
I guess my problem is that I'm painfully slow at EVERYTHING, meaning that if I wanted to write a rather in depth post about something happening here it would land up taking me half a day.
But no more! I'm gonna limit myself to 20 minutes every couple days to put something up here.
I think these few lines have already gotten me a little over time budget so if you're reading this, here is a ridiculously awesome song for your ears to enjoy:

Five Men Three Missing - She Doesn't Dance

Five Men Three Missing - Myspace