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M3H 007LP
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2023 limited restock. In South Africa, June 16, 1976 is unanimously recognized as the definitive turning point in the tenor and intensity of the fight against apartheid. It comes as the internal capacity of the major liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress is nearly depleted; with many of its leaders in jail or in exile. Black Consciousness (BC) arises from these ashes and the apartheid regime scrambles to contain it in the form of assassinations, banning orders and trials. High school youths in Soweto, having already imbibed BC from their teachers (a group of newly-recruited university radicals), begin planning protests that would attain an incredible kinetic thrust. These demonstrations were supposedly to rally against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, but as student leader Tsietsi Mashinini says in the documentary film UPRIZE!, the situation in South Africa had been explosive for a long time and any issue could have delivered the shift in momentum that June 16th would symbolize. This new SPAZA release is the original motion picture soundtrack of the film UPRIZE!, but it serves a parallel function. Recorded in Yeoville, Johannesburg, during a three-day improvised scoring workshop in 2016, the recording is almost the underside of the film, which strikes a defiant pose both in the selection of speakers and in the tone of much of the archival footage. The June 16th protests stretched over several weeks in a countrywide blaze that turned out to be a sustained show of solidarity among students and an unbridled display of brutality by the state. The recording process mirrors that protraction, working out a new language with which to commemorate the death, darkness and defiance of those days.
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M3H 004LP
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2021 restock. An entirely improvised live album recorded in one take in the inner city of Johannesburg, featuring some of the city's finest experimental musicians, namely Siya Makuzeni (vocals, FX, trombone), Nosisi Ngakane (vocals), Joao Orecchia (synthesizers, electronics), Waldo Alexander (electric violin with FX pedal), Gontse Makene (percussion), and Ariel Zamonsky (upright bass). In the context of this improvised album, the term "spaza" not only refers to the name of the outdoor gallery in Troyeville, Johannesburg where this project was recorded in the autumn of 2015. No way. In South Africa, "spaza" comes heavy with meaning. It could refer to an informal neighborhood store usually attached to someone's house, operating out of a shack or a repurposed shipping container. It has come to signify an entrepreneurship spirit, especially in South Africa's black townships where restrictions to business ownership meant that only a few could attain that privileged societal status of legitimate business owner. But in contemporary South Africa, spazas are also contested territories, given continental migratory patterns that have seen the country attract millions of political migrants against the backdrop of the remaining economic and spatial legacy of apartheid. Spazas have emerged as sites of war, bloodshed, wailing, and despair as financially disempowered South Africans routinely mete out their frustrations on those spaza store owners that they consider "foreigners" and "outsiders". But spaza can mean something else entirely. Perhaps obliquely, there are musical references to be grasped at. Spaza, the term, the recording, and the location, evokes a spirit of musical independence, a looseness, a jam session, a collaboration, a coming together of great minds at the corner to shoot the breeze, or let off a seriously considered prognosis. In this sense, Spaza, the album, is a conceptual coalescence of space, the body politic and an approach to music making. Helmed by the arbiters of spontaneity, Mushroom Hour Half Hour, this loping, expansive recording brings together musicians already adept at creating on the fly and playing in unlikely set-ups with their instruments of choice. Spaza is at once opaque, direct and an unyielding morass of joy melding with pain, furtiveness caressing boldness. This could be the sound of the city turned inside out, ruminating on its troubled history and uncertain future, the sound of celebration and pensiveness. The results, while shaped in the milieu that is Johannesburg, are that of continental astral travel, a sonic reading of the city's dreamscape.
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