Garth Erasmus — Threnody for the KhoiSan

Garth Erasmus’ first album has pretty much anything that listeners might want when looking for artistic engagements with the sonic culture of the Khoisan, a First Nation’s peoples native to regions of present-day South Africa. I realize that sounds like something of a rather esoteric niche, but there are countless recordings released that make use of some combination of ethnomusicological research (I.e., field recordings) and various post-production techniques. Either the documentarian impulse holds sway – we hear what our fearless researcher once heard, etc. – or the source material is turned into something vaguely resembling music. In either case, the very possibility of there being something sonically important at all tends to be taken for granted. What makes Threnody for the KhoiSan unique is Erasmus’ point of departure and what that means for the resulting work. 

Much of the Khoisan instrumentation on the release is the product of Erasmus’ own doing, attempting as best he could to recreate the objects he found in a museum. An artist by training, this primal scene is telling for the work that ensued, the artist having found culture already in its museological state, working backwards to recreate and revivify that which remained either lost or petrified. The impact that this process of discovery and production had on the album cannot be overstated, as Erasmus presents his recreations in their naked, almost amateur, state, as sonic artifacts imbued with possibility – not in the service of music, but as things in and of themselves. The instrumentation is thus pretty sparse throughout, lots of empty spaces and silence. Far be it from me to quibble with Erasmus, but I found the threnody in the work’s title to be something of a misnomer. Not a lament, in other words, but more as if musicians had landed on a distant planet and had to teach themselves how to play. The sensibility goes a long way in describing the rather short duration of most of the 14 tracks. These are sketches, really, more than finished compositions. The loose, improvised nature of pieces like “Manta Praise” and “Ambient Khoi” fit the mould, while others veer into more standard musical territory, like the free jazz sax playing on “Lockdown Duet Milano-Cape Town.”

Anyone interested in learning about the sonic culture of the Khoisan will find ample fodder, as well as those who are a bit bored by the traditionalism in the field recording genre. Erasmus is an artist, after all, and can therefore sit comfortably between the parallel realities of a constructed, imagined culture and one that many might mistake as “authentic”. To check it out