Two brothers tearing up Cape Town’s dance floors one bass line at a time. Say hello to GRAVE DANGER - Cape Town’s renegades of noise who are raging with machines. Finger licks and hi-top kicks, hello GRAVE DANGER, goodbye pleasantries.
The GD brothers - Malcolm (Magnum hi-fi) and Ian Skene (Kid Colt) - are finely tuned…crude, loose canons of electronic groove. Fuck Cool, they’re two cheeky kids, using high-tech toys and making crazy noise. 1995. A decade after Knights of The Turntable was when it began for the Skenes. Their first album, POP Shop, found a home and we found the dance floor.
Technology & mass consumption; the 21st Century plague. So much NEW. But certain elements remain constant, like purified timeless equations. Specifically keepin’ things fresh, “striving to amalgamate most dissonant, strange & harsh sounds” (ART OF NOISE - Luigi Russolo)
Noise can be ruthless or syrupy, wrenching or alluring. But whatever it is…it is always Real. Right here, right now. The present. You hear it, you move to it, you taste it and you witness its revolutionarily power.
Music.
Absolute sensory indulgence. Guilty only for the glorious way you lose yourself in the moment. The dance floor is a flashing melodic prism; a kaleidoscope of motion and a soundscape where humans meet to rendezvous with technology.
For GRAVE DANGER it’s all about finger brushes, syncopated mediums and a dance floor canvass shredded in glitchy interludes and colored with an infectious lust for the Beat to Go On.
Names like Hütter and Schneider. Post-war Germany welcomes Kraftwerk. The world welcomes an industrial German sound. These guys were part of all that the 1960s represented: change, uncertainty, freedom, experience and love.
Energetic and Alive. Hello Noise.
1977’s “Trans Europe Express” and 1978’s “Man Machine”…..a musical discourse, novel and slightly disturbing, begins to take form. The titles of songs scream of speed and technology.
By 1980 music is the back-beat to a world full-speed ahead. A time of deranged, textured aesthetics and sounds. Acid house, water bottles and Naughty Nibbles. Artificial Intelligence & Warp Records. The Detroit scene, the German scene and 303 drum machines.
The 1990s. Think of the Burden Brother’s and Africa Bambatata’s electro sliced remake of the 1982 track “Planet Rock”. Think of the track “Bantha Trax” and the 808. “Nothing sounds quite like the 808." Beastie Boys, "Super Disco Breakin"
……. Seesaw sounds, reversed and tossed…electro rippled through the 90s to teeter-totter, shilly-shally and yo-yo into the 21st Century. Kids, young and old, from across the globe bent and oscillated old sounds, galvanizing the scene with new banging pulses and kinetic audio concepts. Electronic sound remains the proof….progressive proof of a world evolving through electronic experimentation.
Toffler talks about The Techno Rebels back in 1980, and as we enter 2010 everyone’s talking about GRAVE DANGER…Cape Town’s Techno Rebels; a little deranged both in music and self. GD is “Trying the Trick and Spinning It”.
So from the Jedi Knights, myself and GRAVE DANGER, “May the Funk be With You”. See you on the dance floor.
And fuck keeping it tidy, its summer, let’s get messy.
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