BA student studying Film and Philosophy at UCT
Director at Arkology

A fierce ole artist grandma called Joan Jonas (no relation to Joe Jonas) famed for having transmuted consciousness-evolving performance art into bourgeois video entertainment so good that she subsequently found herself accused of killing the radio star*…

(“Jip! It was her, we found the culprit!”)

…Tried to atone for her sins by leading us all back into a love of listening via a surprise introduction to an obscure anthropology professor who doesn’t take himself seriously enough for anyone (beyond academia) to have ever been able to find his work had it not been for her help. 

What a disservice to the grand collective, and nevermind everyone else, to my own enjoyment of life, this would have been: deep, deep, deep down into the depths of the ocean he went - travelling inside a submarine called Elven studying intently the difference between hearing and listening as he went. 

Redefining the notion of a mediascape, reimagining the concept of sound as received by human placed in the belly of a cyborg. 

Stefan Helmreich having, thus, reorganised noise into melody with utmost humility: Joan Jonas, by mere association, consider yourself atoned. 

Meanwhile, a guy called David Troop had written a book called ‘Ocean of Sound’ to help him survive the double-blow grief of losing his father and wife to death in the same week. 

The result was me picking the book up, on the other side of the world, on quite a random day and consequently falling - like Alice in Wonderland - into a world of infinite magic on all the other days since: gamelan dance, Debussy cured of white supremacy, Sun Ra’s hymn to the setting sun, a history of ambient music - starting from the 1990’s - something called ‘amniotic fluids’ (a genre unto its own) and a renewed obsession with an overly romanticised pre-Edison Japan: a place with an affinity for and love of Shadows. 

Enter: an escape from your current life into the next without first having to traverse purgatory. Life and death devoid of suffering. Some would call it Enlightenment. Others would call it Love. 

Here, I was also to discover the first ever Japanese satellite station constructed as a peaceful rebellion against those that claimed Time to be linear. “No” they said, pioneering twenty-four-hours of continuous radio transmission programmed to synchronise with tidal patterns, sunrise, sunset and changing phases of the moon - “Dream Tides…” 

Everything you hear me play on this little account is somewhat inspired by the awakening I’ve enjoyed thanks to all these wonderful little accidents and serendipities. 

Let the music play on. 🤍🎶

I was at this bang and this is what they played...

Followers of Kobus Meiring