Dylan Valley
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Speaking at a sort of virtual release party/cultural symposium in honor of Asher Gamedze’s July 2020 debut LP Dialectic Soul, the American poet and scholar Fred Moten referred to the Cape Town drummer and composer’s work as an “amazing interplay between turbulence and pulse.” Gamedze, a cultural historian himself, ran with the phrase, adopting it as the organizing principle behind that record’s newly announced follow-up. Turbulence and Pulse is due out May 5 via the Johannesburg experimental label Mushroom Hour Half Hour in Gamedze’s home country, with Chicago avant-garde mainstay International Anthem handling the release stateside.
“Time in music is a metaphor for thinking about time in history and how time moves,” Gamedze explains in a press release announcing the project. “The way we’re taught history is generally in a way that robs people of agency in imagining themselves as part of history and how it unfolds. It is something that happens to us. I think there’s a productive metaphor in that because the sense of time in music is created by musicians playing together. If we can use that to think about history and time in history, you can see that, actually, history is created by people in a whole range of ways. At the heart of it, historical motion is created by people organized and acting together, whether for progressive or reactionary ends.”
With news of the forthcoming release comes the project’s lead single, “Wynter Time” — an unhurried, nine-and-a-half minute saga that feels essentially tethered to South African soil even as Gamedze and his group project astrally into the outer realms of the known sonic universe. The churning, propulsive drive of Gamedze’s rhythms and the colossal patterns Thembinkosi Mavimbela plucks into his double bass keep the song spinning in fixed grooves, though always under the threat of skipping into an unknown elsewhere on a moment’s notice. And the track’s dense center of gravity allows Buddy Wells’ tenor sax and Robbin Fassie’s trumpet to stray lightyears away without falling out of orbit. The song is dedicated to the Jamaican writer and radical intellectual Sylvia Wynter, with her unpublished manuscript Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World specifically in mind.
“Wynter Time” arrives alongside a short film directed by Adrian Van Wyk in which the actress and activist Qondiswa James huddles shivering in a skimpy black dress on a lush landscape across the river from a hideous construction site — a note in the video’s YouTube description lists resources for learning about local resistance to Amazon’s ongoing development in Cape Town — before emerging from an ad hoc fitting room onto a beach, where she wades in a flowing white gown into the bay with fabric shears in both hands.
Watch the clip and check out Turbulence and Pulse’s cover art and track list below.
Turbulence and Pulse album art
Turbulence and Pulse tracklist
1. Turbulence’s Pulse
2. Wynter Time
3. Locomotion
4. If It Rains. To Pursue Truth
5. Melancholia
6. Alibama
7. Can’t See The Sun
8. Sometimes I Think To Myself
9. Out Stepped Zim
10. Underground Formation
11. Melancholia (Live in Cairo)
12. If It Rains. To Pursue Truth (Live in Cairo)
13. Out Stepped Zim (Live in Cairo)