Source: Fred De Vries (Fred De Vries)
The undercurrent of Somerfaan’s second album KykOfSyKyk is a yearning retro-futurism that goes hand in hand with approaching middle-age and looking back. At Nel, a.k.a. Somerfaan has turned 39. Recently he has bought a house in Melville, where he lives with his new girlfriend, a huge Alsatian and a screaming bird. Nel has entered a new era. The hard drinking and partying days, which included doing tequila fuelled Hunter S. Thompson impersonations in a redneck bar in Warmbad, are over. “I leave the extremes now for my music,” says Nel in his home/studio on 2nd Avenue, with KykOfSyKyk cascading in the background.
Nearing forty, settling in, that’s when you start remembering your young and innocent days, and wondering about the journey. How did you end up where you are now? So if KykOfSyKyk, with all its references to science-fiction and comic strips may initially seem a bit childlike, it’s not. It’s a light hearted take on the loss of innocence and dreams, not unlike the recent Flaming Lips albums. It tries to capture a time when the world looked pleasantly strange and full of promise, when events hadn’t closed in on the endless possibilities that life seemed to offer. Despite all its beats and bleeps it’s essentially the musical equivalent to the plaasroman.
“I made this album picturing myself back in the seventies, when I was sitting on the farm. I was ten or eleven and just getting into all this weird rock music,” says Nel. He recounts how, when he was a laaitjie growing up in Heidelberg, he met this much older guy with an incredible record collection, an encounter which we may file under ‘epiphany’.
“His name was Nols de Bruin. His father was a famous ventriloquist who worked with two dolls: Tommy Thompson and Jacky Jackson. His son was this rebel smoking dude who agreed to lend me two albums a week on the condition that I didn’t scratch them. So I drove off on my bicycle with this stuff, back to the farm, and I would put on (David Bowie’s) Ziggy Stardust for the first time, or Black Sabbath. Eish! I liked the heavy shit, UFO those kinds of bands.”
And then there was the growing awareness of a bigger world outside. “On the farm we had this radio set and we just couldn’t get it right. Trying to pick up a signal on medium wave or short wave, you would sometimes stumble upon Russian stations, and it sounded like space to me. I spent quite a bit of time fooling around with that idea. And I think this album has quite a bit of short wave sci-fi sound to it. Sci-fi was my escapism growing up in a conservative place. My favorite? Spiderman, hahaha.”
KykOfSyKyk is lo-fi electronica with vocals. It uses the vintage synthesizers, dance beats and the odd rap, mixing it with looped real instruments, ambient passages and Nel’s own shaky voice. “When I was growing up I only liked music with a heavy guitar in it. But then somebody played me Gary Newman’s Tubeway Army, an album called Replicas. For the first time synthesizers sounded as powerful as, no and even more exhilarating than the heavy guitar.”
The album features a couple of At’s outsider friends, including actor Frank Opperman, Diesel Whores guitarist Arnaud van Vliet and his old Battery9 buddies Huyser Burger and Paul Riekert, with whom he played during the second half of the nineties. Riekert’s deep, foreboding voice can be heard on Wilde Ganse, one of the essential tracks, and one of the few that doesn’t quite fit the light retro mood.
“I had this song and asked him to add something to it,” exlains Nel. “I wanted something like Nick Cave. So Paul came back with this weird poem about somebody parking on the stoep, and they’re drinking whiskey, and he’s got fragments of memory coming through of somebody, and he can only remember her fingers and the smell of malt on her breath. He says: some people are like that, they don’t get wiser but dissolve into these fragments like the ice in his malt. And also the malt he’s drinking didn’t benefit from ageing. So the people, the memory, the fucking whiskey, the whole thing just fragmented.”
It took Huyser Burger almost sixty takes to get the rap on Wet n Vibe right. But finally, after gargling vodka in the morning, he managed, belting out the lyrics about the struggle of finding your place in a hostile world. “Ek’s moeg van sukkel, sukkel en probeer, dis guerilla oorlog, fokol gaan my keer.”
The multi-talented Huyser also made the painting for the cover, which depicts Somerfaan as some kind of action hero, knife in hand, fighting an octopus. This harks back to the days of Spiderman and sci-fi comix. “Somerfaan is in the interplanetary intelligence service,” says Nel, grinning like a little boy. “And there’s a specific song on the album where he says goodbye to his girl Soetelief. She leaves for Venus and he stays behind on Mars. But as he takes off in his spacecraft, Mars is attacked. There’s even a little newspaper clipping about it (on the inner sleeve). So Somerfaan is travelling the planets looking for Soetelief. He doesn’t know if she’s alive or not.”
Pardon? At times the album does feel like it that has been made by someone who for the final time had been allowed to live out his teenage fantasies. The brief introductory opening track has Frank Opperman announcing the arrival of our hero in a boxing ring, hysterically shouting “Somerfaan! Somerfaan!”. Even the album’s title is a nostalgic nod to days gone by. Kyk of sy kyk (‘see if she’s looking’), is a reference to the adolescent game of push and pull eye contact in a disco or a bar.
But, again, the (pre-)pubescent fun is deceptive. There’s always something ominous lurking in the background, an uncontrollable outside force that destroys the moments of innocence and bliss. Haaie Onder Ons could almost be taken as a metaphor for the mood of the album. “It’s about me and a girl skinny dipping in the sea,” says At. “It’s all about the danger and thrill of it. Because you can’t see, and there’s no moon, just all these stars that verskiet. And all of a sudden there’s lightning in the air and you can feel the shark circling beneath you.”
At times the humor seems a bit too juvenile, like on the outsider’s anthem Ons Gaan Almal Hemel Toe, where he uses a sample from a chat line. “I called a phone sex chick, trying to get sleazy samples. I wanted to combine the chorus ‘ons gaan almal hemel toe’ with sin. So I called one of those numbers, but didn’t have a real good way of recording it. Therefore I held a mike to the phone speaker. But then I couldn’t hear what the chick was saying. So I’d just go ‘ja, ja, ja.’ And meanwhile she’s playing with herself and goes: ‘Are you watching it darling? Are you watching it sweetheart?’ That’s what I recorded.”
In his daily life Nel is a sales rep for Puma, driving highways and byways to bring the sporty stuff to the shops. The road, the trips past the endless veld and small towns with their ubiquitous general dealer, is an excellent place for letting the mind drift. “It’s a fantastic job,” says Nel. “I service the platteland. I go to Potch, up north all way to Messina, east to Malelane, in my Volvo, a fast one with a fantastic sound system. So I get to listen to cds quite a bit. I think I listen to more than anyone else because of all these trips. Meanwhile you check out all these wide open spaces. Dis befok.”
Given this landscape and his love for Americana bands like Wilco and Iron and Wine, one would expect his music to have more of an alt-country feel to it. He nods. “I would like to make an earthy album,” he says. “In rugby terms, with the first album I played for the Curry Cup, the second is Super 14 and with the third I must be a Springbok. For that one I’ll be far more serious about singer/songwriter stuff while keeping it interesting with loops and samples. I’ve made some new songs and they sound much bigger, vet, like a techno Tom Waits.”
Just as he seems to get more serious, talking about lyrical and musical experiments and risks he gets up to fetch more beer in the fridge, and says. “But I also like to make people laugh. It would be great if they’d all be singing ‘Ons gaan almal die hemel toe’, poesdronk, while stomping around the fire.”
Indeed, it would be a nice change from De la Rey.
CV
1968 Born in Heidelberg
1987 Does his army stint and meets Paul Riekert
1989 Moves to Ponte City, Hillbrow, and works for a textile company
1991 Moves to Springs to work for his father in a school uniforms/sports/fashion shop
1995 Works for Puma as a sales rep
1995 Joins industrial band Battery9
1999 Starts dj’ing
2000 Leaves Battery9
2003 Releases Somerfaan
2003 Wins Geraas award for ‘Best electronic album’
2004 Releases Uiters Geheim, a remix of Somerfaan
2007 Releases KykOfSyKyk
Heroes/influences: Writers: Charles Bukowski, Harry Crews, Hunter S. Thompson; Music: El-P (“Hard on the ear, iron galaxy hiphop, harsh and nostalgically beautiful”), Captain Beefheart, Tricky, Tom Waits, Iron and Wine; Artists: Salvador Dali; Afrikaans: Takuza (“Homo-erotic Tarzan styled photographic novel”), El Debbo (“Comedian who rolled his eyes around”), Jacob Pierneef, Etienne Leroux, Voëlvry Movement (“But laaitjies like Fokofpolisiekar don’t impress me that way”).
