The Song Remains the Same?
Monday, March 16, 2009
Short attention span? Pish!
And now for something completely different.
I’m not sure whether Johannesburg is within the mighty scope of ArtHeat’s hermetic circle of readership but in the event that there’s a Vaalie out perusing this, you could do worse this Wednesday than to meander towards the Warren Siebrits Gallery. “Why?” you might ask. Well Wednesday night sees the launch of the CD re-issue of KOOS’s The Black Tape.
The brain-child of artist Neil Goedhals (second from left and almost always misrepresented as a conceptual artist in the media) KOOS represent one of those fragments of South African art history that have slipped through the cracks of mass-recognition and spent the past 20 years floating in relative obscurity, much like Goedhals himself. Incidentally the band featured Kendell Geers as a member for a brief period of time.
Musically they were an adventurously punky amalgamation of sonic experimentation and good old-fashioned geraas. The band found themselves situated on the fringes of the Voëlvry movement though they were never really incorporated into it, the links are tenuous and have more to do with the lefty Afrikaner-identity zeitgeist of the late 80’s than anything else. Concluding the history lesson, this week’s edition of the Mail & Guardian has a relatively concise (albeit omissive) article about the band.
As far as I know The Black Tape was the only release by the band whilst Goedhals was still alive. The Walkman Tapes were released retrospectively in about 1990 and The Long Lost KOOS Tapes comes free with Fred de Vries’ Club Risko book although good luck to you if you want to find a copy of that. From that perspective it’s great that they’re re-releasing the album although you have to question the move of remastering it. As anyone who has heard his pre-Koos solo material will tell you, Goedhals was a huge fan of the noisy aesthetics inherent in under-production. This track from Johan van Wyk’s website demonstrates this nicely. That was very much a part of how the original KOOS recordings sounded, The Walkman Tapes was recorded through a microphone attached to a cheapie walkman after all. So why alter that?
I’m going to remain cautiously optimistic about this for now until I’ve actually heard the new version, hopefully it’ll be a moot point. It will be great if the band finally get the recognition that they deserve. The fan-boy in me anxiously awaits.
The launch of the KOOS reissue takes place at the Warren Siebrits Gallery (140 Jan Smuts Avenue, Rosebank) on Wednesday March 18 from 6pm. There will be 500 copies of the CD on sale
Labels: KOOS, Neil Goedhals, Warren Siebrits
posted by Tim Leibbrandt at 6:33 PM
6 Comments:
I love these ephemera of history, and I love when they get a second chance at life, even if it is remastered. It kinda reminds me that history isn't all dark.
Yay, the eighties! That stuff was huge and everywhere, or stuff which this is definitely part of, though I've never heard of these guys before. it's not all history that disappears, it's the history of small places like where we live. If a movement that size had happened in England, we'd all still be listening to it.
Kendell Geers, Neil Goedhals, Megan Kruskal, Marcel Van Heerden, Gys de Villiers,Velile Nxazonke
I went to this last nite: amazing to see the old guard, yellowing teeth and all. Fucking age gets us all in the end...
Koos does represent an incredible moment in SA pop culture, yet somehow, with the way things have changed so radically in the country, the air of edginess that surrrounded anti-establishment stuff like this has dissipated.
All that's left is a set of angular post-punk songs that sound like Joy Division/Pixies cast-offs, sung in Afrikaans.
As with much resistance art, once the object of one's vitriol has disappeared, the art is often revealed as aesthetically bereft...
Was this "resistance art"? I don't think so. Didn't punk and post punk deny the substantial existence of any institution which could be resisted? They were importing ideas from fine art, like the ready made, appropriation, pastiche - mixed up with ideas from the post modern theatre of that time , such as mutable boundaries between the event or the stage & the spectating reality or ordinary life, playing with inverting and deconstructing the power relations between the performer and the audience, between the 'stars' and the masses, between the hit parade and the bath-tub, etc AND spitting (just one more time) in Daddy's Eternal Eye.
Actually, apart from Niel & Ian both dying as 'suicides', both probably driven off the edge by the side effects of seizure-medication, there is just no comparison between Joy Division and Koos. Apart from that they were both bands, and that they shared, almost, a time frame.
Such an idiotic comparison. Sorry, but it is. Just listen. They were doing different things.
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