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LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR

'DURBAN 1973: STORY OF A STRIKE'

Kindly email Ari Sitas (arisitas@gmail.com) or Tinashe Kushata (tinashe@kushkonsulting.org) for a password to access and listen to the audio for 

Durban 1973: Story Of A Strike

(mastered, mixed and edited by Andries Bezuidenhout)

on its secure webpage: 

https://www.insurrectionsensemble.com/durban1973storyofastrike

BIRTH OF THE CRUEL

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It was a pleasure as much as it was a challenge to curate this adventure and place these tracks next to each other. “Pleasure” in so far as the unwinding of the video to re-search for them found a fascinating seam whose ore had not rusted with the passage of years. 

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The track selection is about music that reached the sonic limit of the Ensemble without much pre-planning. We never said we were to explore the mix of tonality and its “atonal” nephews. The primary goal of the Ensemble was to create a space for maestri from India and South Africa to try and co-compose and co-write meaningful explorations that spoke to the acuities of both countries. It reached beyond these countries to involve East African and Ethiopian creatives on this side of the Ocean and Chinese on that side. It was always the craft of listening to each other and asking people to listen to us and with us. In doing that, expressivity found itself often to play with unorthodox boundaries. And as all our recorded work was of live performances over the 15 year period an element of spontaneity and improvisation was always there.​​

​​In placing these pieces next to each other our suspicion was confirmed: they act as a door to another vista of possibilities: the birth of something that is beyond what is understood as song or “tone poem” which was quite “cool” but we hesitated and unlike our jazz mentors called it the “Birth of the Cruel”! The allusion to Miles Davis and Gil Evans is slightly off-key as it should be, because most of our work searches for anarchic disquiet.

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We start with a piece called “Grounding” from our first album because it is the interplay of non-fretted strings that allowed us entry into the tonal landscape of the Ensemble: the sarod, the Nguni bow, the cello and the double-bass probe the limits of the possible. We envelope the 17 track adventure with “Relah” from our second album which starts with a disquiet between the Uqalo, an wind instrument invented by Sazi Dlamini and its modulation by electro-acoustic programming by New Music maestro the late Juergen Brauninger before it bursts into a celebratory tonal and revolutionary coda.

 

LISTEN TO THE AUDIO FOR

'BIRTH OF THE CRUEL'

Kindly email Ari Sitas (arisitas@gmail.com) or Tinashe Kushata (tinashe@kushkonsulting.org) for a password to access and listen to the audio for 

Birth of the Cruel

on its secure webpage: 

https://www.insurrectionsensemble.com/birthofthecruel

©2022 by Insurrections Ensemble.

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