Studio for Interactive Sound presented interactive installations at UNYAZI Festival of electronic music and sonic arts in Johannesburg, September 2005. Two pieces were adapted into a new transportable format specially for Unyazi.
The installations were set up in the foyer of the Digital Arts building, and received a great deal of interest from musicians, WSOA students and other visitors.
Matthew Ostrowski, an American composer and performer plays with Waving Window. Electro accoustic guitarist João Orrechio from Berlin lurks around Bridge to the Sun and Other Sonic Tales.
More on the festival participants and performances can be found at:
The first festival of electronic music and sonic arts in Africa
The computer, the sampler, and the turntable. The new sound technologies embraced by the post-rave generation have linked them into a network of experimental and unconventional musicians going back to the electroacoustic pioneers of the 1960s. Over the last decade this explosion of creative collaboration between several generations of electronic musicians and sonic artists has been celebrated in a growing number of international events, such as the Sonar Festival in Barcelona and the Phonotaktik in Vienna. Now electronic music is coming to Johannesburg with the UNYAZI festival.
NewMusicSA, the South African Section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, is proud to present UNYAZI – the first festival of electronic music and sonic arts in Africa. Over four days in September, top international musicians, teachers, and artists will be featured together with African musicians who are working in this field.
Under the curatorship of South African composer Dimitri Voudouris, the festival will run from 1 – 4 September in Johannesburg at venues on the Wits University campus in Braamfontein, in association with the Digital Arts and Music Divisions of the Wits School of Arts.
Funded principally by the National Arts Council of South Africa, the festival will feature the extraordinary range and variety of electronic musics from Africa and the rest of the world. UNYAZI will consist of
· a symposium with presenters from Europe, the Americas and Africa,
· workshops and live performances throughout each day of the Festival by some of the most well-known names in the sonic arts both internationally and nationally, from tape music to kwaito and everything in between.
Come and experience legendary names such as the Egyptian Halim El-Dabh and American pioneer Pauline Oliveros in electrifying performances and workshops.
Halim El-Dabh is regarded as Egypt’s foremost living composer and has been a pioneer in electronic music since his first tape experiments in 1944. Like Bela Bartok his work draws on his field research into traditional musics from North Africa and Ethiopia and he has explored both electronics and folk instruments such as the Egyptian clay drum, the “darabukha”. Pauline Oliveros is an American composer, performer, author and philosopher who has profoundly influenced contemporary American music through her works with improvisation, electronic music, myth, ritual and mediation.
A wealth of other composers and performers will come from Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Cyprus, Egypt, Mexico, Norway, Spain, Sweden,Zimbabwe and the USA – Rodrigo Sigal, Lukas Ligeti, Blake Tyson,Yannis Kyriakides, Matthew Ostrowski, Maxime Rioux, George Lewis , Luc Houtkamp+POW,Francisco Lopez,Sandra Ndebele,My Kingdom For A Lullabuy,Schnee
Local electronic musicians will not be neglected. At Unyazi you can also catch performances by artists and composers from all over South Africa: Warrick Sony,Brendon Bussy,Louis Moholo,James Webb (Cape Town), Theo Herbst and the KEMUS Ensemble (Stellenbosch), Sazi Dlamini, Jürgen Bräuninger + Sazi Dlamini and Zim Ngqwana (Durban), and Carlo Mombelli, João Orecchia, Skwatta Kamp, Pops Mohammed, Rheza Khota, James Sey, Skid, Chris Wood and Dimitri Voudouris (Johannesburg).
Workshops will be conducted by Blake Tyson , Pauline Oliveros, Francisco Lopez , Brendon Bussy , and Luc Houtkamp who with local composers and performers will develop over the four days a local POW ensemble that will perform live on the last day of the Festival.
A bonus will be the screenings of the films of Aryan Kaganof. Kaganof, South Africa’s most exciting filmmaker, has worked closely with electronic musicians in many of his films.
A special Listening Room will host performances of works for premixed tape.
Full information at: http://www.newmusicsa.org.za/