hype :: Speak With Music

"I looked at DJing as not just being a profession, but an artform. Not everyone has the ability to craft pieces of art. Maybe they can string pieces together, but I wanted to explore the deeper aspect of the art of DJing, the understanding and skill that goes into it. I needed to find a vehicle through which to express that."

"I want to prove that good music will move you, no matter what your preferred genre," André Manuel told local Cape Town paper Athlone News. "And I hope that through this, the participants will find some enjoyment in sharing in the gems and beauties in my record collection... the gems I've collected over many years. As a DJ, playing it safe is a negative. You have to push people, give them something new to think about. It's important to listen with your ears and not your eyes. Packaging and marketing play a huge role and if you only follow the marketing machine, you'll only be listening with your eyes".

I met André at Container's Village of the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne, where he had curated one of the 43 shipping containers: "Speak With Music challenges the idea of what exactly a DJ's role is. We take the DJ - in this case André Manuel - out of the club setting, into an intimate space where he conducts 50 personal orchestras for 50 perfect strangers. He takes each of the 50 visual personal accounts of the stranger's worlds, and translates them into musical imagery. Through this universal language music André converses intimately with each of his subjects. And each of his 'conversations' were mixed live, and enhanced using cross-overs, effects units and other mixing tools, with his subjects' photographs as his inspiration and stimuli."

Check out the debut release of André's Cape Town-based label Dala Flat: Future Cape by RockArt (pictured above). It combines classic/freestyle jazz with indigenous Cape sounds, and succinct production of subtle electronic beats and rhythms. Stories are told of Nuwestraat, Kleine Jannie forced to kill his farmer boss, about a chilling Ladies Night, celebrations...

Dala Flat seems set to do for southern Africa what Mexico's Nortec Collective achieved for Latin America...