Spoek is known for straddling and borrowing from all kinds of genres which is why he seemed the perfect candidate to send across Africa to record a bunch of different indigenous musical stylings. While there, he used software like Vodafone Cloud, a program in which a bunch of producers and musicians can mix and share field recordings and original snippets, which meant that the music that they were making was constantly involving.

Fed up with the constraints of the mixtape/album format, Spoek put out his record Wave Crusher late last year, referring to the experience as “the maddest music bootcamp”. Presumably, this was because of all of the crawling under, over and through afrobeat, alt-rap and surf rock that makes up only a small amount of the plethora of genres that he melded together using cutting edge electronic technology. Alongside this, he collaborated with a bunch of local musicians. Basically, the record is culture jamming in it’s most excited form. We caught up with Spoek to find out more.

You’re quite a collaborative person by nature and you often work with different South African artists. What was different about this project?

It was pretty spontaneous. I was working with new people and just seeing what happened rather than a going through a lot of pre-production and planned stuff.

What’s been the biggest outcome from the project?

The outcome of it has been two people that I’m now working with. DJ Spoko, he’s quite a well-known DJ who was involved with DJ Mujava on Township Funk. We’re making music with another guitarist who met on this trip and now we’ve been working on about 9 songs together.

How did you find the groups to work with? A lot of them were in quite remote places, right?

There was a musicology student that I knew who had ongoing projects and a lecturer at the University of Kwazulu Natal who helped me a lot.

At the beginning it was hard to see how it would all come together. We weren’t working to a reference track we were just kind of looking for magic. We were letting people express themselves and have something to record. For some communities it was really important we recorded traditional songs so they’d have them for posterity and what not. We gave a lot of recordings to a local station in Bloemfontein, some of them had never been recorded before.

By the time we went to the next town, near Kwazulu Natal, we were able to play them everything we’d recorded in the previous town. But they had a different aesthetic, it was lush oceans and mango trees, it was raining everywhere, so the music had a different sound.

And then what was it like with these sounds?

I’m not a trained musician, I do everything by ear. I will edit along the road and hear when things come together. But even the percussive sounds were tuned very differently, their guitars were tuned differently from anyone I’ve ever seen. But that was ok because I’m hardly in tune anyway.

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