THE FIRST TIME

Audio Recording (Tape 1)
December 1993

This marks the first in a series of audio recordings. During the course of the FLAT, we began to tape our conversations. These became both a document of our ‘brainstorming sessions’ and raw material for later sound work. Barry, Vaughn[1] and myself messed around with an antique gramophone by playing the ‘non‑playing’ side of a one‑sided 33 RPM Schubert record (a shrill sound/noise) at 78 RPM. We also discussed possible ideas for recording music:

Vaughn:          They should release a Butthole Surfers album on the old 78-speed format.
Barry:              No fuck! We should do that.
Vaughn:          You know PIL released a limited edition single with the hole misplaced on the record.[2]

I’M RITE, I’M RONG
Audio Recordings (Tapes 2 - 4)
December 31, 1993

These are recordings of conversations on New Years Eve, and featured voices that included Barry, Vaughn, Moonlight[3], and myself. Vaughn was our downstairs neighbour who had become involved with the FLAT and was a key participant in the first sound recordings. Moonlight, a grounds‑keeper at the Natal Technikon, had recently become a frequent visitor to the FLAT, when he and Barry became friends. The recordings on this particular evening captured what was not uncommon under these circumstances. We four men, Vaughn, Moonlight, Thomas and myself, were drinking and talking about ‘women’.
Significant in the production of these tapes was the fact that they revealed not only the problematic nature of recording another’s voice and in particular a Black man’s voice, but also the use of such material in one’s own work. Though several hours of tapes were made, it was a particular set of phrases spoken by Moonlight that asserted themselves as highlights from the tape and were later used by me to create a looped sound work.
The phrases that were extracted are from some point in the evening when Moonlight revealed his thoughts on prostitution. He said:

[Sic] Now we are here in Sud Africa to talk da truth. Nobody getsuffishus. We are going to talk our aims... what dey we are concentrated… eh...

Black Ladies, just stopping to sell your body!
White Ladies, just stopping to sell your body!
Indian Ladies, just stopping to sell your body!
Eh… Coloured Ladies, just stopping to sell your body!

We are not allowed to selling dat. Accept da spirit of God![4]

There were not only complexities inherent in the circumstances that led to Moonlight’s comments, but also in the later appropriation of his voice for a sound work. Though innocent in and of itself (the recording was not done in secret), this drunken exchange among four men was fraught with subtle dynamics. There was perhaps some suspect ‘encouragement’ that led to Moonlight’s declaration, and indeed, in South Africa, there is no exchange between black and white which is not charged with an undercurrent of racial self-consciousness. That these issues of race and gender were both so directly addressed in this ‘party atmosphere’ seemed also significant.[5]

Barry & Moonlight 1993