Sound and friendship
On music, friendship, and love
This is an excerpt from a longer piece on the friends who changed my life in 2008.
I had grown up with good music. UB40, Jonathan Butler, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Jonas Gwangwa, Winston Mankunku, the Schilders, Robbie Jansen, Basil Coetzee, lots of Queen, Cat Stevens, and a whole ton more. My parents were always playing music somewhere, and weekends especially were loud with concert DVDs or CDs playing while the braai was going. My primary school days were spent obsessing over simunye grooves on SABC 1. We got some of the best kwaito music ever made for free, just so, there on the TV. Even then I had fallen in love with Thandiswa Mazwai of Bongo Maffin fame. This was my upbringing, groovy, easy vibes.
High school was really when I began developing my own listening tastes outside of those taught to me by my family or informed by the dominant radio station in our home, P4 which then became Heart 104.9. The station of all the standard classics of particular parts of Cape Town. My sonic world, up to that point, was jazz and reggae and some church numbers, kwaito, lots of soul and r ānā b. My grandmother was in the church choir, she was a choir leader, and she played piano and organ for the church, so my sonic world was also filled with these markers too, despite my move away from Christianity in my teens years.
When I came to the University of Western Cape in 2008, 18 years old and thirsty for any new experience, my sonic world was still small, an inexpansive thing but ready to grow. When I met my very weird best friends in that first year of university, they all three came with their own vast canons of listening. This little piece is really an ode to the most persistent among the three, Andriques. From the start, he was a force. He wore his queerness on his sleeve, he wore his depression, and the very literal scars of it on his sleeve too. He was who he was, he is who he is. A quiet and influential force, a relentless incoming tide, influencer before it was even a thing.
He had a nokia those days, a slide phone, white and blue I think, with music controls on the sides. At some point the battery became so swollen because he was ALWAYS listening to something, even while it was charging, so that poor old battery suffered. He played the music so loud that even though he had the in ear cabled earphones in, we could hear it bleeding out.
Hard, harsh, growling, fast, guttural music. Hardcore. Unlike anything I had really heard before. The closest being some of the metal my dad introduced me to, but that was from the early waves of metal music. I was curious, but god I was also so closed off in my listening. We shared a ton of other music, but it was a long time before really hard metal music, and really filthy hardcore became a common language between us. Before that moment, we shared punk and ska and two-tone, dub, and when he started DJing after his move to Joburg, dubstep first and then the broad pantheon of electronically produced musics. He was an influence on my eventual obsession on techno music, what would come to constitute a core theme in my first MA thesis.
Andriques has always been a significant influence on my life. In our now 16 years of friendship, we have gone through the absolute expanse of it all. The music was a gift. But making it okay, in those early days already, to be mentally ill, to be queer, was the biggest and most important gift he gave me. I was so closed in so many ways, and so radically open in so many others, like any 19 year old I suppose. But my friend opened the world to me in ways he couldnāt even know. He was open with his struggles with mental illness, something that still took me some time to feel safe and free to be able to do. I was in such denial then, despite struggling so openly sometimes. He made it okay, and for that I am forever grateful. My friend introduced me to music, and in many ways began introducing me to myself as well, forcing me to turn sympathy and empathy back toward myself.
Go listen to some hardcore. Get out to a show and get in the pit.