Righard Kapp has dwelled on the outskirts of the South African music scene for several years now: from his own ambient and noise experiments to his involvement with the ‘On the Edge of Wrong’ festival of improvised music to his sporadic tenure with literary oddballs The Buckfever Underground, not to mention his label’s activities of releasing albums by decidedly individualistic artists and his involvement in the recent reissue of the 80’s South African art-punk band KOOS, it is clear that the idiosyncratic guitarist values a critical and aesthetic discourse that is well removed from the mainstream.
“Strung Like A Compound Eye” is his first formal foray into the territory of acoustic guitar composition. Although his experimental leanings can’t help but creep in, they do so in a manner that is viscerally appealing and immediate. Kapp aims to channel his fringe syntax into something that makes sense to the most casual of listeners: a dillettante’s one minute trolley dash through these outskirts of musical expression he calls home.
Ultimately, “Strung Like a Compound Eye” is an argument for the broadening of aesthetic horizons in a time when variety, though technologically feasible, is remarkably absent from our prescribed media diets, and in a country that is falling over its own feet in order to come to terms with its own diverse cultural identity.
The album, engineered, co-produced and mixed by Dirk Hugo, features performances by Ramon Galvan, former KOOS frontman Marcel Van Heerden, The Buckfever Underground frontman Toast Coetzer, Lee Thompson and Christopher Engel of the jazz outfit Restless Natives, Benguela drummer Ross Campbell, The Wild Eyes bassist Gareth Dawson and Ella Joyce Buckley, among several others.
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