white air
drowning details
arms to heaven
drowning doubt
there is only one
raise your hands to the son
of the beat
beat
beat
let it out

chant in tongues
panting
preaching
reaching
dancing
on the stage
his
arms are raised
to praise
the people
ablaze

a Sunday ceremony?
no
a midnight mass

it began in the desert
of our spirits
it pounds at the deserts of our days

we are the desert
we are the skies
afrika burns
bloodshot eyes
Luca waves a disc
at me. “This!”
my memory overwrites
his words,
“is the future.”

HAEZER in the heat part I

Time to time travel. It was twenty ten and there we were, at a rich hippy festival in the middle of nowhere, with our fridge and our fully kitted kitchen and our big, phat sound system that got us into big trouble.

It started with a spliff that split the sides of an overripe reality. It didn’t end, not really, not in my mind. After hours on the road, we arrived, put up a pointless piddly tent, and I urged my driver (who doubles as a rock star and shining star, depending on his mood) to put That Disc on. The soft sands under our orange and yellow camp erupted. All I remember is blurred arms and blobs of bodies going by me, everything blurred, as crystal clear beats ate me alive, beats deeper than the devil, and us, higher than a kite at Afrika Burns. (And if you’ve been there, you know they get pretty high.) I think I turned into a tornado, and drilled a hole in the hard earth from which Haezer’s electric heatwave seemed to rise. We went wild, we delirious dervishes, driven by sound, suddenly sacred. I know no one was decapitated, but everybody on that dusty dance floor lost their heads that night.

The morning after, a festival marshal came around with a clipboard (I lie. This dang creative memory) or the tone of a clipboard, I think, or of a raised eyebrow and a clicking pen. There’s been reports of noise from your general direction late or rather early last night, she marshalled, and were you playing loud music? NO all twelve fifteen twenty of us answered in perfect unison.  Who needs scripts when you’ve got guilt and good music? Sometimes a lie is the best thing. I hope that lady got her a clipboard anyway, though, coz she was so good at her job, we actually turned the sound system down to a low rumble the next night.

Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. Maybe that was one of the few times in my little life that I’ve been to church and I just didn’t realise it. Not church in the medieval sense, or The President’s sense, not even in the post modern, ironic sense. Rather, church in its true sense –a gathering of people who feel together, and believe in one thing. In this case, the beat.

Fast forward to the recent past, still vivid enough to be present tense, and we’re peaking the stairs at The Assembly, past arch, incompetent door girls and rude bouncers; thank god for Pierre and Blaise.

“Is this what Haezer sounds like?” my friend asks in the din of drum machines and naked skin.

“Well, erm, ye-NO. It’s also high impact electro like this stuff, but Haezer is tighter and deeper-” like a virgin purse, I think wickedly, taking in the view. Idunno about you, but all these middle class kids look the same to me on a Friday night. “you’ll see.”

The mass begins. Chanting, like rugby hasn’t heard in a while, like live music only wishes it could hear. I think Delilah Lips may have been onto something back at the Ram there and there. This is a new movement, a sound capturing the spirit and imagination of a lot of people, some of them even sober.

In Cape Town, this kind of devotion is due, in part, to the efforts of The Assembly over the span of its service to party animals. Cape Town is a small town – it has little business sense, and music has flailed, failed and found an oft financially unsustainable, but very creative home here. Sound’s biggest safe-house is The Assembly indisputably :  a machine that means something, a dark shell on the first floor of a warehouse in The Fringe.

Defined at its inception as a live music venue, then as an international venue, now as an all-round, live-and-electric-international-music-venue, The Assembly offers a platform for sound, and a place for your feet to move to the beat.beat.beat. Their Friday nights are phat. Saturdays rock with live song, and the occasional weeknights roll along wildly to the weekend.

Which is where I am now, still seeing those hands in the air. It’s 2011. It’s April. It’s The Assembly on a Friday night and it’s time to bow down to

HAEZER in the heat part II

Haezer has hit the first button, and everyone has gone wild.  The most approachable of Cape Town’s dark lords of the underground elite, he went from being a full-time, Vuka Award-winning video editor to full-time party starter,  a fact pointedly proven by the  queue sardined outside The Assembly for what feels like centuries.  I stood in that queue for an hour with my new out-of-towner, last-minute-yae-saying party pals , watching most of my resident Fake Town friends flow past with stamps they’d smartly gotten earlier in the evening before wisely disappearing off elsewhere  – read : Kimberly Hotel –  to leave me at the mercy of streams of devoted teen fans.

An overnight success built on months of midnights of hard work, HAEZER is also an overland success, having toured with GTRONIC in Australia, and mixed his jinx with Midnight Juggernauts, Tindersticks and Holy Fuck in Amsterdam.  A friendly guy, HAEZER the Human makes friends easily as he plays from place to place, counting  Smash Hi-Fi aka Leeroy Thornhill from The Prodigy amongst them (that was at INSANE fest). Iit think this was most memorable,” says manager Dominique Gawlowski. “The DJ table fell over and he DJ’d from the floor!”  At ten to one am we get inside The Assembly.  And that’s with help from above…

where it’s all Tommy Boy girls with tequila breath and  synthetically sourced smiles draped in much less than their half-dressed best, and jolly herds of buff, broad-shouldered boys hanging on each other.  They’ve already drowned in the sound, hopping up and down happily, sweating all over one another, tripping over nothing, or just tripping.

“Is it going to be like this the whole way through the set?” my friend asks. I ignore the edge of alarm in her suggestion and decide she’s talking about the sonic aesthetic, not the melting, merging eye candy – I mean audience.

“Look; it’s dance music,”  I shoot back, apologetically.  “It’s supposed to be repetitive. What I love about Haezer is that his beats are dark and crunchy, they have substance; he doesn’t use melody much, he uses rhythm. It’s energy in your ears. You’ll see.”

We go for a can of that nasty, tasty taureen-tainted Taurean, and wait for it from behind. You can see better from there.

A sweetly bearded bad-ass walks on stage and screams erupt automatically from every direction. “Energy in your spine, more likely.” I correct myself to myself. “In your blood and your heart and your soul.”  Titi doesn’t roll her eyes at me because she’s waxing joyful herself; the atmosphere is viral – I can feel my heartbeat matching His beat.

But soon spun out by the slimy bodies all clamouring for a chance to be in Adriaan’s famous frame and forgetting to dance like nobody’s watching, I leave her in Espera’s safe keeping, move around the room.  Aggressive boys try to shove me and I shove them back and they shrink back and this is so boring, this macho kak, let me move back, and then to the side by the loos, which is the best spot, it’s got aircon, space to move, but you WILL bump into friends you haven’t found yet, and they WILL pull you back into the seething midnight mass.

It’s all bright white light and staccato silhouettes under the strobe. I WISH I’d brought my camera, because a D7000 tells it like it is, rather than like you wish it was. How was I to know Discotheque’d blow the best part of its Friday night frills budget on beautiful lighting? Instead, I commit the moment to memory, a lawn of pale human arms pulsing towards the pulpit. The pulpit is pulsing towards the people. Perhaps this religion has a chance of practising what it preaches. It’s hard not to obey the beat and we leave kilos of ourselves behind in puddles and pools on the floor.

What can I say, Eben. I’m glad I waited this long to hear you live only because I was right about you, out in Afrika on the way back from my trip with one word on my lips. You’ve given birth to something beautiful, something that suits deserts as much as it does lakes of love. I hope a film soundtrack finds you soon-soon, and Go!Go! goes from strength to strength (and maybe even manages to seduce more than kids strapped in stalky stilettos and railway track smiles? Maybe   >;)

next haezer giggle PTA

next haezer giggle CA

myHAEZER (audibly awesome stuff)

face HAEZER (14300 fans and counting)

{and no, HAEZER will not be taking confession any time soon; that’s G-zis‘s job. But more about that next time, my little sinners}