Context and Comments

This film is a bit of an art-historical curiosity – at least from a South African perspective.

In 1986, South Africa was in the grip of late-stage Apartheid. ¹

Against this backdrop, my friend – Tony Burton – and I spontaneously founded a band called – Vache Noire. ²

Vache Noire was active between 1986 to 1992. We did about a dozen performances centred around the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand ³ and surrounding city of Johannesburg. 

Our multi-media performances were most often collaborations between ourselves, a loose constellation of artists, actors, sympathetic musicians, and the audiences. 

Our performance posters and flyers were mostly cryptic. Every performance included illegal or dangerous elements – or both ⁴. Nonetheless, we had a  small, but loyal, following.

Musically, our influences were extremely varied.
Some random examples would range from Run DMC, Steve Reich, Hildegard von Bingen, Laurie Anderson, Japan, Edgard Varése; to Psychic TV, Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire, John Cage, Jesus and Mary Chain, to traditional Zulu and Tsonga drumming… and any combination of those. ⁵

Conceptually, we were obsessed with systems – social and scientific – and taking them to their logical, absurd extremes. Or, finding interesting similarities or syntheses between totally unrelated systems, or fields, of knowledge.

Musically this manifested itself in us combining disparate musical genres. But we also experimented seriously with minimalist, pattern-based musical lines. 

One can argue that all music is based on pattern, but our patterns weren’t based on musical keys. 

We were into playing evolving patterns, following certain rules, on the “matrices” of our guitar and bass fretboards – almost like primitive cellular automata. 

I was mostly responsible for the “concrete”, repetitive patterns; while Tony did the “plastic” improvisations around them. 

This approach also broadly defined our instrumental preferences. While Tony did most of the percussion and improvised solo instruments, I mostly made the backing tape recordings and loops, computer programming ⁶, as well as film recording and editing. 

The films were designed as back-projections during the performance of certain songs – like I love the smell of burning dust. ⁷

Being children of the seventies and eighties, we had grown up in the pre-internet, analog age; which included – the now almost impossible to relate to – rituals of watching 8mm home-movies and slide shows. 

When I started my first experiments with 8mm film in 1986; it was the smell of the film running past the hot halogen lamp of the projector that instantly took us back to those childhood home-movie nights. 

It was then that we realised that what we were smelling, was the smell of burning dust – the smell of nostalgia. This is what inspired us to create this song.

Nearly forty years after those traumatic yet creative experiences in late-eighties South-Africa, it has been an incredible journey for me to digitise our extant performance films and audio recordings; and attempt to reconstruct this film as is was played live. Projecting the films repeatedly in less-than-ideal situations damaged them with burns, tears and breakages. 

In many respects, the footage has come to embody the smell of burning dust; and I decided to let that aspect creatively flow into this edit. During live accompaniment of a film playing back, sync was not tight. Now I had a single version of the song ⁸ to which I could cut a more refined edit. So, consider this version a “director’s cut” if you will.

Before I finally swapped to video in 1992; I made three more 8mm short-films. But this was my raw first attempt – as twenty-year-old member of Vache Noire – in that violent, but strangely forgotten decade of South-African history.

Footnotes:

1: In July 1985, a State of Emergency was declared. It lasted for five years, and saw incredible violence, repression and censorship. Five years which ended with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison. (return)

2: The choice of name was in itself absurd. Neither of us spoke French – nor anyone but a small handful of people in South Africa for that matter. We were familiar with the slogan – Mort aux Vaches – and joked about being the black cow of the family; but at heart, I think the foreign name represented our yearning for an – “Anywhere out of this world” – that we were living in. 

Later, we did some performances under the Zulu version of the name – Nkomo Mnyama – and eventually we settled on a stylised industrial graphic of a cow. 

In fact, the notion of a secret language; or of some sort of encoded communication was something that we were definitely interested in. I see it as an attempt to create a parallel culture to the status quo in which we were living. I guess that’s what defines the notion of sub-culture or Underground. The morse code – S.O.S. – that I had ‘hidden’ in the film is one example of a coded message. (return)

3: Tony and I had actually become friends as first-year students in the Electrical Engineering faculty in 1985. Conveniently for us, Tony became the manager of The Box theatre on the university campus. A small space which we could book for some of our shows. (return)

4: An audience member told us the amusing story of her well-to-do father forbidding her to come to our performance with the words: “I will not allow my daughter to leave the house with a hammer in her handbag”. (return)

5: I cannot stress enough how conservative and repressive the South-African system was. The artists just mentioned were as far from mainstream as you could possibly imagine – I guess they still are. One could only get hold of such recordings via special order through a few independent record shops. As regards the Zulu and Shangaan drumming; we had made some visits to mine hostel compounds around Johannesburg. There mine workers would perform traditional drumming and dancing on weekends. It was through this that we invited them to some of our performances. (return)

6: Since 1982, I had been using a Sinclair ZX81 and later a ZX Spectrum. I had taught myself programming and was experimenting with rudimentary image- and sound-generating programmes. These results were used in our performances and my films. (return)

7: At the time, it was actually physically impossible for me to add soundtracks to my 8mm films. The only affordable solution I later found, was to copy the films onto VHS video and then to add the soundtrack.
During the live performances, whoever was responsible for film playback cueing, would sometimes resort to slowing the projector speed down or even using two projectors.
I love the smell of burning dust was first screened in the performance Methods of Dehumanisation – performed at The Box theatre in 1986. (return)

8: Recorded during a clandestine session at the studios of Radio 702 in Johannesburg by Russell Hutton. (return)