TAPE 32 QUASI-STELLA OBJECTS

Multi-media audio-visual performance at Jam & Co Jazz Club

July 31, 1994

This event was described by Owens in her weekly arts and music report in the Mail & Guardian. She says:

On Sunday night prepare for the unusual. The folks from the FLAT Gallery will be putting on a sound performance. Always experimenting with different concepts in all fields of art, the performance entitled Quasi-Stellar Objects is definitely not a get down and boogie type jol. Instead it is designed to unsettle the audience while at the same time inviting them to accompany the artists in their experimental journey, some of which will be improvised.[1]

Quasi-Stellar Objects, a multi-media collaborative performance at Jam & Co Jazz Club was orchestrated by Bussy, Martyn, Horsburgh, Barry and myself. Jam ‘n Co (previously Jam & Sons) was an Afro‑Jazz cross‑over club that we frequented. Hannalie Coetzee, the manager had been organizing some interesting programming for the club and approached us at the FLAT about doing a performance evening that incorporated all of our recent experiments. We agreed, and with the general concept of the US lunar landing in mind, we came up with the title Quasi‑Stellar Objects. According to Barry,

“Quasi-Stellar Objects” was a term used in the book Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel [2] to describe the farthermost objects in the universe.[3]

While many collaborative projects at the FLAT had up until that point been quite organic; the introduction of a larger audience, brought with it the need to plan and rehearse a specific set of actions. Barry and Horsburgh adopted a more ‘rigid’ approach in planning for the evening, which was at odds with a more improvisational concept favored by Martyn and myself. As tensions grew, the collaboration proved to be so strained that at some point Martyn chose to opt out of the event. Though the more ‘rigid’ concept was eventually adopted, in retrospect, we were still ill prepared for this event.
We did ultimately agree on a number of things. We determined that the first action at the event would be the playing of a pre-recorded audio piece based on my Nina/Paul/Paul/Nina experiment with looping phrases. Here, I recorded Barry and Horsburgh dueling, in stereo, the words ‘hand’ and ‘craft’. This was repeated and overlaid ad-infinitum until the words became unrecognizable. While this was playing, Barry laid down a huge sheet of paper in front of the stage and drew in the audience’s space. The filmmaker who had documented the Internotional moved amoungst the performance shooting footage of us that was then screened through a live feed onto a television facing the audience. Hand/Craft went on for 12 minutes.
Bussy then, bringing forward some of his ideas from Aural Hygiene, began to play a repetitive set of chords on his viola. As before, I sampled him and re-fed the ‘info’ through a loop‑tape live in front of the audience, until a cacophonic drone was reached.
Barry and Horsburgh next sat at two tables that had been set up on the stage with microphones and a typewriter[4]. Once Bussy’s ‘set’ was complete, the two began reciting texts ‘tennis‑style’ at each other in what resembled the process previously employed in the Miracle Filter tapes. I then sampled their conversation erratically and feed that through a loop back into the system. Horsburgh’s phrase: “That’s unthinkable! You can’t just destroy an entire race,”[5] for example, was repeated continuously with other samples as they continued with their recitations.
A friend of Barry’s, Willem Huysers, was staying with us at that time, and he contributed a very ‘bad’ version of a Doors song to the programme. Though Martyn had pulled out from the project initially, he was in the audience, and attempted to join in by banging on a table.
The performance was loosely inspired by a disk that we had found documenting the US space programmes of the 60s. Throughout the entire evening, the performance was perforated with comments from “Houston”. It was noisy attempt at poetry, on stage.
The oddity of our presenting such a performance at this Afro-Jazz club was immediately evident to us when we arrived to see that a professional ‘sound engineer’ had been hired. Our obvious displacement was further heightened when a black Englishman, who had come to the bar looking for authentic ‘ethnic music’, was confronted with us. He shouted throughout the entire performance, that he did not come all this way to see “racist white people perform this western crap”.

This explosion, unsettling as it might have seemed was an honest and vibrant reaction to our presence, and in a sense contributed to the unpredictable chaotic state that we welcomed. However, more destructive tensions had been forming within the FLAT group, and the fabric of our community was breaking down. It would never be the same and we would not perform collaboratively again at the FLAT.