Benguela - Southern Right 10'C Mix by Brad Bird from Ross Campbell on Vimeo .
Benguela are officially back together!Whooohooo Blue Anthem wins the best instrumental SAMA award!!
Hey after a whole 2 years the Tony Cox album 'Blue Anthem' featuring Benguela on all but one track is out through Instinct Africaine and Sheer Sound. It sounds huge! Head over to Tony's myspace to hear a couple of tracks..
Here is the track list:
1. BICYCLE 2. STOMPIE 3. Y4 BLUES 4. BLUE ANTHEM 5. BABY THULI BOOGIE 6. MISTY 5AM 7. MINARETTE 8. MAJOR MYNAH 9. FOR KEN H 10. RIVERSONG
www.tonycox.co.za
Nice Review of Benguela's last performance at the BMW Pavilion Dec 21st 2006.
Benguela was formed in 1996 and found it's direction by default. Guitarist Alex Bozas needed some back up for a gig at the folk club and guilt tripped drummer Ross Campbell and double bassist Brydon Bolton into helping out. What happened that evening was largely spur of the moment creation around a few loose ideas due to lack of rehearsal time. 10 years down the line they're still improvising every set, feeding off the audiences energies and evolving spontaneously as they themselves feel the way.
"People think of improvised music as Jazz because it has been marketed as Jazz. A lot of performers you can't classify get put into Jazz, but Jazz has a style, rules and common practices, and Jazz musicians improvise within those boundaries. Improvised music - true improvised music goes beyond that. It has no preordained language. It entirely creates it's own form and genre. It just creates, which is beautiful. What's interesting about an improvising band is that everyone in it is changing all the time, listening to new music, seeing new things, experiencing new emotions, developing.. so your perspective on life is changing. And because you're never playing the same chords or singing the same lyrics, you're never acting: it's always a true and immediate expression of who you are."
The name 'Benguela' was taken from the cold current running up the West Coast of Southern Africa and reflects both the flowing nature of the music as well as being geographically representative of where the band came together and the climate in which they live.
Check out:
Open Record - our record label
Rhythm Records - for Digital Inability downloads
BENGUELA ALBUMS:
SUI - JULY 2003
The 6 original live tracks were recorded in front of 30 friends (and later mixed) at Sui Studios, Cape Town on 08/02/02 by Dirk Hugo assisted by Ramon da Silva. The set was completely improvised, and is presented as it happened with only a couple of small edits on tracks 5 and 6.
Mastered by Dave Maclean and Dirk Hugo at Maclean Mastering
Cover painting by Charisse Gardiner
Design by Roxanne Spears
DIGITAL INABILITY - NOV 2001
Digital Inability' was culled from around 20 hours of material recorded at various venues in and around Cape Town between july '98 and jan '01 on various formats and by various kind hearted souls (namely Mike Abbott). Most of these tracks were then surgically edited - a nip 'n tuck operation to rid ourselves of waffle per se. To the uninitiated this may sound like cheating, but believe me it was necessary. Benguela's waffle content is gross and it's self indulgence beyond compare - we thought of editing as a kind of mercy killing. The songs were also strung together to imitate how we normally move from where one idea left off to another in a live situation. Poetic this may sound, but in reality shoving two songs together is more akin to continental drift and the formation of the Himalayas and should be practiced only under supervision.
SPUTNIK - 1998
Recorded live at Sam's Restaurant, Windhoek, Namibia in Sep '97 with a Carol mic to a tape deck. For some reason the sound at Sam's was quite special and the girls from Namibian Air who came to dance each night for two weeks felt it. These songs became favorites at gigs - for not long after we abandoned the the knowledge to recall anything specific and ignored the crowds pleas for something familiar. Zvi Gorlic was the man who owned Sam's and who's tv we blew up and who's Jack Russels are called Rocket and Sputnik.
COMPILATIONS / COLLABORATIONS:
Burnt Friedman & The Nu Dub Players - Can't Cool 2003
Track 11 'Five Star Group Travel' is a Remix of Benguela's track 'Southern Right', a different version of which appears on the remix album 'Chop Sui'.
Koos Kombuis - Equilibrium 2002
Benguela as backing band on 11 of 15 tracks recorded at sunset studios.
Breyten Breytenbach - Lady One 2002
Track 7 'another country' and track 11 'time' both using edited live tracks recorded at the same time as those on 'digital inability'.
Breyten Breytenbach - Mondmusiek 2001
Track 2 'my woorde is 'n wind waar die reen reeds was' using 'camissa special' and track 10 'tronkvoel' using 'hypnotic' off 'sputnik'.
It (compilation of Cape Town bands)
Track 10: 'X' - live @ Purple Turtle '99 which is a different edit of 'Xnic' which appears on the album 'Digital Inability'
Oppikoppi - Bushveld Blast
Track 7 (cd2): 'Textures of Memory' - recorded live at the festival in '98. Another version appears on 'Sputnik'