"Trying to find healing in this traumatized society": An Interview with Garth Erasmus

How important is context for your interpretation of art, personally?

I think you hit on a very important thing. 

It's even more important in South Africa, where there's a new consciousness developing in the country. At least in the last 20 or so years. More so than immediately after the freedom election of 1994. South Africa is such a complex society. There are twelve official languages, for example. Just to name one thing that makes everything so crazy here.

For example: my own personal experience stems from the rural East of South Africa, where I come from. It has led me to this path of following my indigenous ancestry. I've done that extensively in my artwork.

Yes, we should establish that right from the beginning: you've had a career in painting long before you dabbled in music...

Yes, I really consider myself to be a visual artist first. The music thing came late in my life.

When we talk about how art became a healing place for you and your cultural expression: it's not like you grew up in a place where you had easy access to a cultural education, right?

No, not at all. It's important to understand the system of apartheid and how it worked. There was a strict system of administration of all these different racial groups that the government had to keep apart.

For example, each community group had its own education system. These education systems were designed to achieve different outcomes. The most general, generic outcome was that the government needed workers and slaves to prop up their economy. A class that they have complete control over. The education did not encourage any sort of deep intellectualism and liberalism. I would put culture, art, music, theatre, in that category of liberal education. There was no such thing. There was no art, no music, no creative writing, no theatre.

I had a little bit of a start because I could draw very well. Everybody knew me as the artist – so I would draw charts for teachers for their kids. I would draw posters for people. Very simple, naive things, you know? 

Is that why you chose to become an educator yourself later on?

Yes, when I was 21, I was attending a teacher training college. In the education system, there were three things you could achieve: You could become a teacher in the school system. The girls could become nurses. And the other guys, who were sort of lesser skilled, would become carpenters, bricklayers, mechanics, and so on. 

I actually wanted to be an art teacher. For that, there were just two institutions I could go to.  One was in Cape Town and the other one was in Johannesburg. 

Both not exactly close to where you grew up…

I grew up in a place called Port Elizabeth, and I was born in a place called Uitenhage. These place names have changed now.  

I went to study at a college in Cape Town, far away from home.  When I turned 21, I had a big birthday party. My mother sent me a special birthday present all the way from the Eastern Cape, and it was a painting set with real oil paints and brushes. It was accompanied by a little booklet on how to paint faces, how to paint portraits, how to paint landscapes, and so on.

Something that strikes me hearing that: What is your relationship between virtuosity and expression, in your art and your music?

I did eventually attend art university. But it was already in my 20s. I had missed out on all this education, this schooling to prepare me properly for university. And so when I eventually came to university – I think I was 22, 23 – I struggled a lot with doing things correctly.

It was a very classical, very academic approach to art. I did not cope well. I could see from the students around me what they were achieving, and it was clear to me that there was something lacking in my technique. 

I began to add sand and paper and all kinds of things into my paintings. I enjoyed that sense of freedom that comes from just expressing yourself, experimenting, and making new discoveries. It's something that cannot be replaced by academia. I've never lost that, and I still do that up until this day. Even in my music.

When did you feel like you developed a style that is expressive of your personal perspective? 

Oh, I have to think a little bit about that. I would say it was after I left university and had to start creating a career for myself. When I finished my studies, I became an art teacher at a very old church school in District Six in Cape Town.

It was an arts center that catered for primary school children and primary school age. At the same time I was doing my art seriously on the side as well. But you have to remember: those were still the apartheid times. I'm talking about the early 1980s.

Because of the ongoing student riots?

Yes, since in the student uprising 1976, the government could not control the students all those years. They just had constant problems with the students and they had reached a point where the country was on the point of a revolution. The strategy of the government of that time was to declare a state of emergency, which was like a lockdown. 

They closed all education institutions, primary schools, high schools, colleges, universities for like a three-month period. I was a teacher, so I took advantage of the time that I had on my hands and began to do personal research. 

I became interested in our family history. After all, I found myself in a strange place in Cape Town, where I had no family. Even though I got married when I was in Cape Town, my wife did not have family there. We were both from the Eastern Cape. It was a very lonely kind of existence. I was aware of my otherness to the people in Cape Town. 

Over here, the words "subversive", or "underground" are thrown around so quickly these days… you and your peers must’ve have faced real repercussions for your work? 

Yes. Absolutely.

There was a natural sort of formation of younger generation artists beginning to develop in our communities at that time. You have to imagine that now, from my point of view and in terms of context, being an artist trying to find his own voice... I realized, you could not find your own voice, if you were just doing political artwork all the time.

The state of emergency came around, and this was the moment when I decided I want to do something about these things that have been bothering me. I began a period of research that changed my life completely.  

I discovered all these very simple and ordinary but beautiful historical facts. We had never been exposed to this. That is why I found it so beautiful. It gave me a different understanding of where the country comes from, what its indigenous culture was. We had just absolutely no knowledge through the school system.

Did this turn around this feeling of otherness in Cape Town, which you described earlier?

Yes. All of a sudden it made sense.

An ordinary South African with an ordinary South African upbringing, that’s how I considered myself. I realized that all the people in my community shared the same experience of being prevented from appreciating this history.

This knowledge was more meaningfully political than the other politics that we were dealing with outside on the streets.

More foundational, in a sense?

Foundational. Yeah. If one could understand this history, you could understand the contemporary politics that we had to deal with.

This hidden history you’ve learned about, is the history of the Khoisan, the non-bantu first nations of the South African region, which became a through line from your paintings to your music.  

That's right. The first thing that it affected was my visual artwork. I stepped out of that museum on my way home, very inspired. But I had no idea that the music was going to happen to me the way it did. Up until that point, I'd been a painter, right? I had been quite a successful, in inverted commas, as a political artist.

But there was this moment in the museum when I came to this section where the Khoisan musical instruments were on display. All the instruments were in glass boxes, or glass cages. There were no earphones to listen to how these instruments sounded or anything like that. It was just a visual display.

I reckon you must’ve perceived them more as sculptures at the time then?

That is exactly how my inspiration worked.

It’s a classic African tradition. A lot of my friends were sculptors. And I was pretty good at woodwork at school. 

Did they have actual names and descriptions? Was it your intention to recreate them?

I had no knowledge that I wanted to recreate them. I had no knowledge of the music aspect of it at all. But the character of most of the instruments that were the most penetrating for me, were the bow-like instruments that had strings.

I could see myself creating three-dimensional objects with shaped wood and add strings, really avant-garde sculptures. Anyway, I went back home, and I began my journey.

Did you really train yourself to play on these self-built instruments then? Or did you just put them somewhere and then at some point you went, "how do I make those things sing?"

The sound experience was so profound for me that the idea of only making sculptures just went out of the window.

It's hard to explain, but… I had the inkling that if I persisted long enough, I would be able to actually lock in to what the music sounded of this ancient civil community. I had a sense that that was locked up and needed to be unlocked for me.

I also had an instinctive feeling that this was unlike the music that we had known up until that point. All the music that we had ever heard was, like European, Western pop music, whatever. It always came from somewhere else. 

I suddenly felt it all belonged to me. I felt like a unique person, who was on this amazing voyage of discovery, you know? But mostly I felt that, whatever this is, I had the responsibility to share this with the community.

You mentioned something that feels relatable in many contexts today – the incapability of a people to imagine real change happening in their lifetime. So, if your whole approach shifted in 1985, how did it change after 1994? With the actual dawn of a new reality?

Well, look… Firstly, it was a huge surprise, right? There was a shock element to it because of its huge implications. In a weird sense, there was a little bit of not being prepared for what was going to happen.

The three or four years after 1994 were a very crucial period – a time to reset and find balance again. I always have to emphasize that, when talking about me, I'm talking about me representing a community, a racial grouping in South Africa. You know? We still were living the kind of apartheid racial existence up until that point. 

When you say "we", you’re referring to the social category of what was called the “Colored” in South Africa, right? 

That's right. The Colored community.

Even the white people have this uniquely South African trauma. We were thinking that the politicians, this new government, would have their finger on the pulse of that trauma, and they would… would just start to do something about it. 

But all the politicians that formed this new government under Mandela, all these guys were well-educated intellectual kind of people. Unlike Mandela, who never left South Africa, and who was imprisoned all those years, and unlike that generation of people who stayed here, all these guys were educated abroad at these British, American and even Russian universities.

They had a kind of idyllic understanding of how they wanted to structure this new society. They did not have the grassroots experience of being here all the time and understanding the nature of the people. Our society is very different to the European societies and the Western societies that these guys had lived in for so long. 

Now you've got this new society, and you are the darlings of the entire world. I remember that time clearly. It was like Hollywood for us. Everybody loved South Africa and what they had achieved. There was no bloody revolution. It was a velvet revolution, right? 

How did this change manifest itself in your specific community? 

For example, in the Colored community, we always had this thing about having been called and named "Colored". It originates from the Afrikaans or the Dutch, which is, "kleurling". 

This one particular group is a very mixed group. They could not make sense of us. The Black tribal groups are easier to understand. It was the Zulus, or the Vendas, or the Xhosas. But this other group had been so affected by colonialism, so changed by colonialism, so disturbed by colonialism, that there had been a certain amount of mixing and creolization happening already. Not to mention the fact that South Africa also had a slave history...  Given the politics of the time and the politics of the struggle, the Colored people generally had a resentment for being called Colored. 

All of us were a bit more mature by now. And we could quickly see that even though things had changed physically and politically, that spiritually and emotionally things were gonna take a little bit longer. 

The missing part in this story is how you really became engaged in the music world. I guess first with your group Khoi Konnexion? Is that the first time that you actually performed music with a group?

Well, no. After 1985, I began on this journey of experimenting with sound. I began to try to build instruments now that could appropriate, and visually connect with the indigenous people. This quest was not purely musical to start with. It was more a physical making of objects.

I still had those dreams of being considered or taken seriously from a visual art point of view for this particular work. I started building very simple and naive instruments. I still have a few of those very first instruments that I made, I never threw them away or anything. 

Coming from this very specific context – how did you make sure your art maintained a universally applicable quality? 

We were a politically politicized society. We were talking another kind of language, you know? When I began to look at indigenous cultures, I began to read a lot. I'd go to libraries, read up on the Native Americans, the Sami in Scandinavia, the Aboriginals, the Maori, the Chinese culture, the Indian cultures, the other African cultures... 

What I was trying to do with my indigenous knowledge, was defining a new sense of pride away from the politics or beyond the politics. A post-political pride. All these emotional things were wound up and symbolized by the kinds of instruments that I was building at that time. I quickly began to find these skills to play the instruments and find out ways of making music. Up until about 1990, 1991, I had already made quite a few instruments. And I did find the bravery to start playing in public. 

Where did you find stages for these types of musical experiments?

There was quite a huge folk music tradition in our community. Whenever there were political rallies at that time, there was always a little cultural aspect to it. People who wrote poetry were invited to come and read.

So I convinced some of my friends, mostly female friends, to accompany them with these instruments. And that was the first kind of music in a public performance. In 1996, '97, poetry had become quite serious in our environment.

One of our famous Cape Town poets passed away not so long ago. His name was James Matthews. He was an elder. He would have a poetry reading session at a jazz club in Cape Town once a month. I attended some of them, and I played with some of the poets. At one of these sessions on a Sunday, I met Jethro Louw, who would become my partner in the Khoi Konnexion. Like me, he was from the countryside, not an urban guy, you know? 

He had a deep sense of ecological systems. Knowledge of herbs, medicines... And he was an amazing poet. He wrote poetry in Afrikaans, which was uncommon at that time. In the underground, in the political sphere, everything was in English. Almost a little bit out of a protest. It was almost a bit controversial to have poetry in Afrikaans.  

In Europe, people started taking notice when you performed with the German band Kante and exhibited in Hamburg. Why did it take so long for you to release a Garth Erasmus solo album?

I wasn't just interested in a certain genre of music or kind of music, or just the indigenous stuff. No, no, no. I also discovered jazz music. When I was young, I was into rock music. Later on, I discovered jazz, and that really took me in another direction. I became fascinated with wind instruments. I began to experiment with that on my own as well.

But all the time that I was performing or working with Khoi Konnexion, I always had to give up a little something of myself. And there were a lot of things about performing in public in South Africa, which is generally conservative. We can't be compared to a European country or a Western country. Not at all.  Yet Khoi Konnexion managed, in over more than 20 years of its existence, to make crucial contributions to the South African cultural scene. 

I got into the habit of really getting into the music on my own at home. And I really began to enjoy it. Especially during COVID, in 2020. Again, like 1985, there was another lockdown in my life. During that lockdown, I recorded a lot. I had no idea what I wanted to do with them or what their fate was going to be, until this Kante project came along.

We had met them in 2017, and we'd played with them in 2018, 2019. We were supposed to carry on that relationship, but COVID interrupted all of that. So after 2021, '22, the last aspect of that House of Falling Bones project with Kante had to happen. The first part was the music making, the composing, the performances, the concerts. That was part one. Part two was there was this visual art aspect to it. The Kante guy, Peter Thiessen, and his wife Ruth, who are the two visual artists in Kante, they organized an exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthaus.

It was a very contemporary exhibition. A lot of tactile objects, installations, sound. Peter had this idea of making dubplates of our music. I contributed a few of my tracks for him, and he put everything on the dubplates and made it part of the exhibition. You could go up to the shelf with the dubplates, and you'd be able to listen to the music. 

So on the opening night of the exhibition, there was a guy in the audience who I met for the first time there, Stefan Schneider, from the record label TAL. He obviously was attracted to the dubplates. He really loved the music. Later on he contacted me with a proposition that he would like to release my work on his label. 

One final thing I wanted to ask you about: you are also involved with the SENSA collective and their Entanglements Festival. How did you link up with this group of experimental, mostly electronic music people? 

Yeah. Well, in this new found South African society that we have now, everyone has a sense of freedom. Even the white population, which has always been traditionally connected to their European ancestry and their European and Western experience, and how electronic music has developed there.

I'm a very modern person from that point of view. I enjoy the connection between the ancient and modern technology, in the music world especially. I've become fascinated with certain aspects of the electronic revolution. One of those is using pedals, amplifying these instruments that I build. That was a new discovery for me. As soon as I began to amplify and experiment with amplification of the instruments, the nature of the instruments changed completely. 

I developed a circle of friends with these electronic musicians. In an ironic way, even though most of them are, like, white guys, all of them experienced a similar kind of alienation that I had experienced. We attracted one another, and our worlds meet at this intersection between technology and acoustic music.

A close-knit network of musicians began to shape over the last five, six years. We organized under the banner of SENSA: the Sound Experimental Network of South Africa. I happen to be the only one dealing with these acoustic instruments. All the other guys are heavy into their gadgets, computers, laptops. They're nerds {laughs}!

And the Broken String Ensemble, who is that?

Oh, the Broken String Ensemble, that is all of my German connections. Stefan Schneider is a musician in his own right, another electronics guy, and he brought in this loose group, who are the Broken String Ensemble. Everything is sort of centred around my music. You know, I can't read music. I'm a complete improviser. They are excellent musicians, so it's easier for them to adapt to my way of doing things than the other way around.

I noticed there's these two versions of The Ascension of Milford Graves on both records. What does he mean to you? 

For me, he is one of the godfathers of free and avant-garde jazz expression. His interest in science and the intersection of science and music is so fascinating for me. He's a very important figurehead from that point of view. I know that he is also somebody who was not easy to work with. He had his struggles in the musical life as well.

Last question: I read somewhere that you never listen to music without fully paying attention. How do you want people to approach your music? 

Everyone has got a personal approach.

The main thing for me that people should take away is the ancient nature of the music. I would like people to respond to it in the same way it inspired me in the first place.