Long after most of their musical contemporaries from the 1980s have lapsed into silence or irrelevance,the Surfers are creating music that is perhaps more influential now than ever before. The Kalahari Surfers were the original South African “Dub Scientists” and their rhythmic and sonic explorations continue to influence a new generation of electronic
producers because of their fascination with the possibilities of using the studio as an instrument, and their investigation of the spatial qualities that can be
suggested through the creative use of the mixing desk and effects units. But the Surfers are much more
than an exploration of dance rhythms and studio techniques; their albums are important expressions of neo-Dadaist South African sound art.
What is not widely recognised is that the Kalahari Surfers are not a group, underground or otherwise. The Surfers are an evolving audio project by the composer, producer and musician, Warrick Sony. In the early 1980s, when Sony started the Surfers project, the anonymity offered by a fictional band gave him the imaginative space to operate during the bleakest and most repressive years of the apartheid regime. The mask of a fictional band also allowed Sony to approach the Kalahari Surfers as a collaborative endeavour, using his production skills to record and
remix an astonishing range of vocal and instrumental performances from figures in the South African underground over the last twenty-eight years. This
latest album includes contributions by the legendary jazz guitarist Alan Kwela, and a haunting vocal
track by Sarah Jane Mary Hills, better known as the bassist from the KZN alt-rock group, Sunways. But it is the collaboration with the South African post-
Fanonist poet, Lesego Rampolokeng that is central to One Party State. Rampolokeng’s dark, often abject visions have featured in several Surfers albums.
However this is the most successful collaboration to date. Instead of treating Rampolokeng as a rap poet, Sony has approached the recording of his poetry as a source of raw material, extracting resonant and cutting phrases from the tsunami of the poet’s verbal tirades. Like Dambudzo Marechera in postliberation Zimbabwe, Rampolokeng anatomised
the predatory and authoritarian leanings of the new elite at an early stage in South African democracy; and his vision is matched by Sony’s highly political
treatment of sound. Since his first Surfers release, a spray-painted, fourtrack cassette called “Gross National Products” , produced in an

Observatory student commune in 1982, Sony has treated the Surfers project as a space for experimental sound design, stitching complex layers of irony and questioning into the fabric of his compositions through audio cuts-up and samples over the spatially conceived Dub rhythms. Rooted in the analogue tape-splice techniques of early Music Concrete and sampling from a rich garnering of field recordings and media excerpts, the Kalahari Surfers’ work constitutes a Dadaist sound archive as well as a Science of Dub production. The compositions on every Surfers album preserve the detritus of South African popular culture like the bus-tickets and printed ephemera in a Merz sculpture by Kurt Schwitters. This practice of treating found audio was always an inherently political practice in South Africa under apartheid: a sometimes brutal exposure of social contradictions or an undercutting of the bland surface of official propaganda that led to restrictions on the airplay of Surfers music and, in the case of the Bigger Than Jesus LP in 1989, a government banning order. Now, with the ominous turn to a rhetoric of “information control” and “media tribunals” by the ruling party, the political urgency of this approach to South African sound art is suddenly relevant again. More poignantly, the final track on the album, “Play Around with the Buttons,”
splices Eskom advertising jingles with a recording of an SABC outside broadcast unit trying ineptly to transmit a live speech by Nelson Mandela. The grim irony of Mandela’s speech lost in transmission by the incompetence of the state broadcaster is presented through a subtle manipulation of the live recordings. And as a special bonus, the album features a “hidden track” which first appeared at the Dada South? exhibition in 2009. Entitled “Pigs at the Trough,” the track is a montage of chanted ruling-alliance slogans, mixed into the vividly recorded grunts and wheezing of pigs guzzling slops. The contradiction is as crude as any of the visual clashes in a John Heartfield collage; and perhaps as necessary in thesepivotal times.
—-Pof Christo Doherty-Art South Africa Jan2011
(Christo Doherty is Professor and Head of Digital
Arts in the Wits School of Arts, University of the
Witwatersrand. He is also a photographer and video
artist.)
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Panga Management : Kalahari Surfers

Panga Management

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Conspiracy Of Silence – Kalahari Surfers

This was commissioned by Microdot Records for their Africa in Trance series – After working on the documentary ” Ochre and Water ” director Craig Matthew gave me permission to use some of the sound recorded during that period. These were chants of the Himba people of Northern Namibia. For further information see the impressive DOXA website: www.doxa.co.za

Microdot wanted a 130 bpm trance album using my extensive field recordings…they got some slow tracks too.
Some of my sound samples are here:

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Living In The Heart Of The Beast  (1985)

LIVING IN THE HEART OF THE BEAST

This is the second album done for Recommended Records by the Surfers. (Title taken from the a track on the album In Praise of Learning by Henry Cow song -composed by Tim Hodgkinson ) Long before sampling became mainstream the Surfers were using cut up bits of radio broadcasts, political speeches and making drums loops with 1/4 inch tape, scissors and sticky tape. Working on an Otari 8track tape machine  in a mobile studio it took hours to put these pieces together. Recorded at the Shifty mobile in 1985 it came to the attention of the British music press and received good critical response. Here is an exerpt from the New Statesman reveiw: ” …it works because it is a formal success: cut up Botha speeches and Afrikaans-speak are set against hi-life and reggae rhythms, while viciously critical (and historically intelligent) lyrics are sung over ..settings that often recall early Zappa….it’s possible to underestimate the powerful symbolism of a record that mixes the rhetoric of white supremacy with black rhythms and thereby undercuts it.” Jon Savage

download or listen to full quality album here

Living In The Heart of The Beast

click on images to enlarge :

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Own Affairs

	1.	Free State Fence 03:18
	2.	The Surfer 02:06
	3.	Prayer For Civilisation 05:21
	4.	Hillbrow 1 05:42
	5.	Hillbrow 2 02:07
	6.	Hippo In Town 02:55
	7.	Independence Day 06:35
	8.	Don’t Dance 02:54
	9.	Crossed Cheques 03:34
	10.	September 84 02:45

about

The first full length Kalahari Surfers album. Completed in summer of 1984 it was taken to EMI to press but rejected by the cutting engineer as being “political, pornographic and anti religious” . Chris Cutler at Recommended Records took up the challenge and released the album through his label.
www.rermegacorp.comthanks to Tibor Tokay for the liner notes and insert

credits

released 12 December 1984
musicians featured :
Rick Van Heerden: saxophone
Anne Botha : voice
Brian Rath: drums

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Beat About The Bush ( 1981- extended) 

original release with “Pure Freude Records”  Berlin

• download

	1.	Beat About The Bush 06:32
	2.	Burning Tractors Keep Us Warm 06:37
	3.	Burning Mind 04:17
	4.	Try No Problem 06:29
	5.	Ten Dirty Fingers (unreleased) 03:12
	6.	Third World Visionary Pilots (unreleased) 03:18

about

Vinyl rip of the mini double 7″ single package released by Pure Freude (PF17) in Germany. extended versio has 2 unreleased studio improvised sessions recently found

credits

released 10 October 1981

All Instruments by Warric and Hamish
Guests: Phillip & Wayne
Recorded on Friday, 10th July 1981
at C&G Studios Westville, Natal.
Photos by Brent Quinn.
Thanks to Peter Mason and Jürgen Hofmeister.
Production and Cover by Harry Rag.

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