Glastonfurry is comfortably the loudest thing anyone in Cape Town will do for stray cats and dogs all year. On Heritage Day, the fundraiser lands at Woodstock Brewery for its seventh edition, a day of metal and hardcore with BEAST at the top of the bill, every cent going to the Cape of Good Hope SPCA. The noise is the easy part to write about. What happens to the money once the last band packs down is worth noting, and it goes even further than you might expect.
If everyone is alternative then nothing is alternative
Damian Strydom doesn’t sugarcoat what it costs to run an independent tour through towns most acts skip. “Funding and sponsorship is a bust. False promises and kak praat. Doen dit jouself!” he says. He has toured this country the hard way with his band Onskuldige Doodsvonnis: played shitty bars, got beaten up by biker gangs, slept in cars. “If you look at the numbers it doesn’t make sense to do it, but it’s taking that risk and that leap of faith and doing it nonetheless.”
On Tuesday night, at Quiet Life Co’s studio in Cape Town, Jabulile Majola and Ross Dorkin, who produced most of Ipasi, sat a small room down and played the album through one song at a time, saying where each came from before we heard it. By the middle of the session the room had gone quiet in the way rooms do when you have their full attention. It is the most moving new work I have heard in a long while, and the feeling in there was real. Most of it is in isiZulu, which I don’t speak, and that only made it hit harder. Nobody was performing it. People just sat with it.
