One thing Tom and I had planned on for 2020 was a Celestial Portraits add-on module for the Fabric Collage Online Master Class Manual, and we’re taking the time now to figure out a new multi-media way to present and teach these heavenly subjects via text, photos, and recorded video. It’s a celestial event not many keep track of, but I’ve been in a sun/moon state of mind recently. The equinox-the date when the length of daylight and darkness is the same-is coming up within the next week. I love the loose and exuberant style Mary Klarfeld used for her quilt “Indian Summer” above. ‘The Soft White Hand’ is an oddity, a collection of tracks that sound both complete yet unrealised (if all you want is a dancefloor (urgh) ‘banger’).The student celestial faces in the following Finish Line post-especially the suns-are almost all based on the same pattern, yet they are all so very different, reflecting the tastes, skills, and personalities of their makers. ‘5 Seconds Ago’ appears as Teutonic Moodyman while ‘7 Rise 7 House’ is a gorgeous housey pastoral cut up (is that a thing?). ‘Go To Sleep Little Baby’ throbs with menace as though sleep really means death, dusty jazz drums breaking up the minimal 4/4 kick drum. Still, it contains loveliness, Laband can’t change his attraction to harmonic balance it seems. ‘They Call Me Shorty’ with its samples of crack-epidemic era interviews from the USA might be a wretched step too far for a backroom love-in but it is an intense arpeggiated journey into the horrors. Moments of esoteric epiphany while the bass rumbles. In some ways, the album would be perfect for those long lost backrooms of 90s clubs, where the weird shit got played, chonged out ravers listening to pitched down story records over minimalist beats. It is a medium I find very interesting because you are taking history and distorting it and changing its meaning and turning it upside down and back to front.” “My music is always about collage, as is my art,’’ he affirms. Laband is an artist in the broadest sense, he’s just using music to articulate his thoughts and feelings but these tracks aren’t blunt objects, they are ambiguous, blurry in mission. The intriguingly title ‘Death Of A Pervert’ collages that classical music box whimsy of ‘Prelude’ together with the lightest of house grooves, sounding more like an art piece than a dancefloor occasion. Not much happens but it is a sublime sunshine burner that grabs and retains your attention right to another nature-sampling end. A collaboration with the acclaimed SA classical guitarist Derek Gripper is a work of high class simplicity with Derek’s beautifully looped guitar, cut up vox pops and a swooning female vocal refrain over a simple in-and-out deep house groove. The first single from the LP, ‘Derek And Me’ is a perfect advert for this transformation. South Africa is one of the planet’s greatest ‘House Nations’ and Laband has tapped into that particularly ‘deep’ swinging sound that exemplifies the SA scene but with his own twist, exploring classical music as a melodic root rather than the filtered soul-jazz chords of much deep house. ‘The Soft White Hand’ is blessed with the same sparklingly production as before but it also pulses with a fresh energy and a surgeon’s eye on the more risky dancefloors.
There are still the ambient soundscape pieces such as the South African news sampling ‘Dreaming In Johannesburg’ and the neo-classical music box charms of ‘Prelude’ ( complete with a healing cacophony of birds and field animals recorded in his garden).
In the past, I have had my issues with substance abuse, and I know first-hand about the nightmares and fears, what it feels like to be isolated and abandoned.”
#Collageit track and field crack#
“I have sampled a lot from documentaries from the 80s crack epidemic in impoverished African American communities and believe my work speaks unapologetically for the lost and marginalised, for those who are the forgotten casualties of the war on drugs. During a period of detachment from the country, he decided to be more personal, though also more general in some ways, harnessing his own previous torments with addictions and expressing empathy through sound to all the marginalised and struggling.
#Collageit track and field full#
This new full length release for the German label Compost Records is a different beast from his previous albums that looked mainly towards his home country for inspiration. Always brightly produced (coloured even?) and utilising found sounds and samples, he sits in a collaged lane that is his alone. Something very special here out of South Africa from Felix Laband, a producer and visual artist that I’ve previously known from some thought-provoking, soundscape electronica releases.
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