14 Mar 2009
Every once in a while a CD lands on your desk that helps you to uncover a scene that you were completely oblivious of. More specific: a friend gave me an album by a local band called Sticky Antlers, and it opened up an artistic universe that I was completely unaware of. In Pretoria, nogal.
“It’s a noise band,” he said. Now ‘noise’ is not my favourite genre. Often it’s just an excuse to hide lack of musicianship under layers of distortion, screams and static. And since I was in a contemplative mood, I put the CD on a shelf and forgot about it. It was months later, at an art exhibition, that I accidentally bumped into two members of Sticky Antlers. They were bright, funny and clever. So the next day I slotted the CD into the player and listened.
It wasn’t noise. These were proper songs, with hypnotic, tribal rhythms and vocals that veered between sensuality and anguish. Sure there were slabs of distortion and needles of feedback, but distortion in the same way Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine used it: to conceal delicate melodies. This was distortion as an extra instrument, to upset expectations and to create a different level of consciousness.
The lyrics weren’t what you’d expect from a spiky band. In 1977 The Clash boasted they “didn’t have time for love songs”, but thirty years later Sticky Antlers have no problems with the whimsical and the vulnerable. Their song In Company is about a wasp sitting on a guitar string, while Blind Horse is a proper love song, written by the bassist for the guitarist.
“I sing: ‘Now I’m your blind horse, feed me sugar cubes and I’ll follow you everywhere’,” confesses singer/bassist Martinique Pelser when I meet her in a Pretoria restaurant. She immediately lights a cigarette.
Pelser is a curious mix of nervously hiding behind her long hair and eagerly explaining the motivations of the band that she started in late 2006 with her boyfriend/guitarist Andreas Schönfeldt, drummer Jaco Wolmeraans and second guitarist Damon Civin. “Our music is ‘unpopular music’,” she says. “Unpop. It could have been popular music, but we went and put it through a blender.”
That blender is an assembly of primitive recording devices that the Antlers use in their home studio: tape decks, old video cameras, “anything we can find to magnetically store something.”
Pelser spent part of her teenage years in the cultural wasteland of Polokwane, which at the time didn’t even have a record shop. “I loved music ever since I was little. The first album I liked was The Platters Gold, when I was five. Later Nirvana was the big thing. I heard them through an ex-boyfriend, and I thought: this is so cool. I had never heard someone scream like that. They made me want to play music; if he can scream and play three chords I can scream and play three chords.”
She got her first guitar when she was twelve, and taught herself to play. “I made up my own tuning. Later I learned later that it was ‘wrong’. But it came out sounding ok. And I just screamed over it.”
Back in Pretoria she met Schönfeldt, an awkward outsider who had an incredible knowledge of weird and wonderful music. “We met through mutual friends but didn’t really talk. I liked him, but we were a bit shy. So we didn’t talk for about a year. Finally had the guts to ask him if he wanted to make some music together.”
That was 2002, and they started their long journey through bands with wacky names. They started as Ecto Kid and Plasma Girl. Then they found a drummer and changed their name to If You Are What You Eat I Could Be You By Tomorrow. The drummer moved to Ireland and Pelser and Schönfeldt continued as PoodlePiss. In the beginning of 2007 they hooked up with Wolmeraans who was a novice to the drums and Civin who wasn’t exactly a Jimmy Page, and formed Sticky Antlers.
“In Pretoria you get very muso people,” says Pelser. “If you don’t play the scales it’s not good. We got sick of that. So we thought let’s ask musicians who like the music but never really played and see what happens.”
But that’s not all. Pelser and Schönfeldt also improvise in When Animals Attack. Damon plays in Immaculate Afterbirth. Additionally Pelser has a solo project called PeggyOkiKareoki. She also features in the hiphop influenced Vulva Underground, a project of drummer Jaco.
Meanwhile Schönfeldt has a side project called Suicycle and is currently working on a comic book. And if all this wasn’t enough, they also formed their own record label KRNGY. Initially it was an outlet for all this creative lava, but it quickly evolved into a proper independent label, which has released 19 CD-Rs and one ‘real’ CD. “We look for bands we like. We’re music snobs; we won’t sign something we don’t like. We look for music that’s different. We try to give the other bands a hand and put them on our label and sell their CDs at our shows. It’s just a friendly hand.”
The real KRNGY gem is that beautifully packaged Sticky Antlers CD that landed on my desk. Since they’ve found a proper distributor in Paul Riekert’s One-F Music, it should make them contenders for a place in the Great South African underground canon, which stretches from 70s legends Suck via Koos, Kalahari Surfers and Live Jimi Presley to Battery9 and Buckfever Underground.
All this activity is happening entirely outside mainstream culture. With the closure of clubs like Nile Crocodile and alternative music shops, Pretoria has become a disaster zone for anyone with a slightly off-beat taste. If you want to achieve something, anything, you must do it yourself.
Pelser nods. “We can burn our own CDs at home and sell them ourselves. Some of the CD-Rs we sell for R10. Then we have R30, R40, R50, R70 and R100. We design our own sleeves and make them all individually.”
Sticky Antlers are a desire driven entity, where music is the vehicle to explore emotions and a chance to travel and meet like-minded people. Pelser dreams of going to Iceland, Norway, Canada, dodgy American towns, play music, see bands.
But for the time being they’re stuck in South Africa, not exactly fertile soil for this kind of indie ethic. “I don’t know,” she says slowly. “I never thought there was much of a future until we started KRNGY and people actually bought the stuff. So maybe there is [a future]. All in all we sold about R5000 worth of stuff, everything together over the last year. It was enough to cover out cost of petrol and making the CDs. Things will expand, it just takes time. Honestly I’ll be happy if I can play music and tour.”
CV
1984 Born in Pretoria
1996 Lives in Polokwane and has her Nirvana epiphany
2002 Studies film and video at Tswane University of Technology
2002 Meets Schönfeldt and starts Ecto Kid and Plasma Girl, recording two CD-Rs
2003 Forms If You Are What You Eat Then I Could Be You By Tomorrow, recording four CD-Rs
2005 Forms PoodlePiss
2006 Forms Sticky Antlers
2007 Starts KRNGY label
2008 Releases Sticky Antlers CD
Heroes/influences
“This is hard because the honest truth sounds corny, but Andreas really was a major influence on me, He wanted, just like me, to do something different and not worry about putting on a stage performances or sounding just like some other popular band of the moment. He also played me music that blew my mind. It’s not so easy finding likeminded people here as far as music is concerned. Also my mom, step dad and Andreas’s parents. They never stopped us, they are very supportive even if some of our stuff isn’t completely in their taste and they help us out a lot in many different ways.”
Music: “Early Butthole Surfers: I would have given my left foot to have been at one of those early shows!; X-Ray Spex, singer Poly Styrene she has one of the coolest voices; OOIOO: very tribal driven stuff. I love the way she structures her songs, the rhythms and use of drum beats; Monkey Chant (Track from Traditional music from the Bali People): we have a recording on a CD that we have on a permanent lending basis from Andreas’s parents. Over 500 people getting into trance-like fever, each screaming their own vocal rhythm, its indescribable, it truly makes me think of the sheer power that lies behind music, the intensity of this religious get together is unbelievable; I also love many bands and musicians because of the ‘Woman Power’ thing: Kim Gordon, L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill, Björk…”
“And then exhibition shooter Anna Okley: she was forced to hunt food alone since I think she was twelve, because her dad died, and they had no cash. She learned to be an accurate shooter this way. It’s like a dream: 12-year old girls with guns going through the woods alone.”
“Finally, Bitterkomix. It’s always nice to find others swimming against the stream along with you. Trying something different, even if people hate it.”