I WANT YOU TO LISTEN

I’m interrupting politics to share love for the music of a Namibian lass now based in Pretoria, South Africa. I communicated with her, briefly, maybe a dozen years ago, when I struggled in the struggling music industry of Durban. I’d just heard her coffee grind voice and wanted her on a compilation I was making. I don’t recall what happened but all that matters is that it never happened… and I began the dark journey into political activism.

However, music remained my joy and escape. Like an Eighties movie nerd, making compilations for myself and friends becoming my biggest hobby. But with the pressure I’ve been under in recent years, I haven’t loved enough.

ANDRA – A SOUND OR SOMETHING MORE

I wasn’t meant to see anyone. I’d left Durban, South Africa for Swakopmund, Namibia, so as to finish writing my book about corruption, ‘Same Shit, Different Government’. My goal was to be anonymous and work hard. But my accommodation wi-fi wasn’t working so I spent the first month in coffee shops and restaurants, chewing words like chutney and fat.

I became a March regular at The Village Cafe, home of the best meat pie and gravy smiles. Above the counter, where I’d pay my bill, were ANDRA’s three albums. I asked which was the best. Ananda Snyman, the manageress, said try the latest. I opted to buy the digital edition on Bandcamp.

Here, in Swakopmund, caught between the seemingly endless desert and seemingly endless Atlantic ocean; between sand and water, between seasons, and between my isolation and extinction, I’ve become acute to small pleasures.

But it wouldn’t be fair to call Andra Cilliers small. Early this morning, in the fog before the sun, her music made me fly…. and unexpectedly write this. She calls the album ‘A Sound or Something More’. I’m telling you that it’s more…

Listen to it below.