About New Cape
Music by Musicians and Other Sorcerers...
New Cape Records presents a new model for the South African recording industry: an artist run co-operative which focuses on releasing music by musicians without any concern for genre, saleability, or product-specific marketing. Our focus for New Cape is to create an honest reflection of music by a collection of interesting musicians, to create a catalogue that can grow and become a work of musical art in itself.
THE MUSIC
The music on this catalogue is a music of magic. A music that is created by the people and places of the Western Cape. A music that can only be heard in an atmosphere of silent magic and appreciation for the individual spirit of this strange and mysterious place that is the Cape. This silent magic is found in the veld, in the Karoo, in the Boland, in the streets of Cape Town, on the slopes of Table Mountain, in the pine forest plantations, and in the yards of a million houses. This magic is a New Music that can only be from the Cape, a music which is for the Cape and which can be understood and entered into by the ears and hearts of the people from the Cape. It is a music which is defined by no genre, which shares no genre, no definable root. It is simply a music made by people who share a rare ability: the ability to evoke the magic of sound, to draw aside the veil of modernity and violence and to expose the living spirit of a creative act that cannot be grasped, that flees when you seek to find it, that disappears without a trace when the sound of the music fades. The musicians in this collective are those that can capture this magic, for a few moments at a time, in songs and visions. These musicians are the new sorcerers, and this collective seeks to bring them together in one place, a confluence of musical vibrations that have already begun to create The New Cape Implosion.
HISTORY by Derek Gripper
New Cape began when Ross Campbell started the label Open Record. The label released six beautifully packaged CDs. Once it became impossible for Open Record to continue, due to the difficulty of promoting left of centre music in South Africa, I reissued my two CDs as plain white CDRs marked with felt-tipped pen and slid into a paper sleeve. I also released other live recordings of my music, finding that being able to print small quantities of my music allowed me to let people decide which CDs they really wanted to hear, and to leave the ones that didn’t sell by the roadside, without the financial loss that I would have incurred had I been printing large runs.
Eventually I started using rubber stamps to mark the discs and then cardboard CD covers which were also hand stamped with the name of the musicians, the name of the CD, and the track listings. Eventually the catalogue stood at around six or seven titles and it became necessary to differentiate between them by visual images which were stuck onto the covers with glue. Then it became important to tell the stories behind the music so that people could feel closer to the music and understand where it came from. This need resulted in the small booklets which were printed on recycled paper and stuck inside the cardboard sleeve.
This arrangement worked for me for some years, during which time I was struck by the difficulty many of my fellow musicians were encountering in “releasing” their music. Then my brother-in-law Alex van Heerden passed away and I was given the task of trying to find a way to release his huge and diverse collection of recordings. This, combined with my own recordings, was enough to start a catalogue and the idea of creating a platform for other Cape artists began to emerge. It was when the great Xhosa musician Madosini approached me to help her record a new CD that I finally decided to get going on the project. I could not believe that one of the musical icons of South Africa actually struggled to get released...
The CDs for New Cape are printed in small runs and packaged in a beautifully printed cardboard CD wallets. These CDs each have a small eight page booklet which help to elaborate on the context of each of the discs of this catalogue of music by musicians and other sorcerers.
RECORDS