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The Black Tape

by KOOS

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In Detention 02:09
In detention by Chris van Wyk _______________ He fell from the ninth floor He hanged himself He slipped on a piece of soap while washing He hanged himself He slipped on a piece of soap while washing He fell from the ninth floor He hanged himself while washing He slipped from the ninth floor He hung from the ninth floor He slipped on the ninth floor while washing He fell from a piece of soap while slipping He hung from the ninth floor He washed from the ninth floor while slipping He hung from a piece of soap while washing
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Sloper 01:58
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Delilah 01:58
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Tsafendas 05:25
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Cowboy 02:34
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Vlermuis 04:09
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about

Three big things happened to me in 1987: I returned to South Africa after a year of touring my Kalahari Surfers band in the UK, I met my wife and I saw a band called Koos. They were, for me, the only South African band that fitted in with the work I was doing with Recommended Records and the political climate of the time. I saw them play at "The Pool Club" and later again at "The Black Sun" in Johannesburg. They performed with incredible intensity combining theatre, art, and music with a punk sensibility, and using mostly the Afrikaans language which best expressed, in my opinion, the particular zeitgeist of the 80s. Not only the South African 80s but the cold war 80s of lies and dodgy deals. Like German, Afrikaans has a gutteral angst that grabs the soul and wipes its feet on it. Russian gets there too; where performance and sonic experience transcend needing to know the language. One gets the meaning of the words through osmosis.
I approached them about recording and brought them into the Shifty Studio one Sunday morning. Most of the tracks were laid down in that one live session. Shifty had already begun recording some of the Afrikaans post-punk bands of that time, like Die Gereformeerde Blues Band and Bernoldus Niemand but KOOS were different. They fitted the decade of barbed wire and bats and barricades of boredom.
I think of that Brecht quote (or was it John Grierson?) “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it."
Essentially a live studio album, it was recorded straight onto a digital Sony PCM ( the first digital recorder on the market).
The recording was released as a cassette tape in a brown paper bag stamped with the word "KOOS". Like a worker’s lunch bag.
Some months later, I recorded one of their performances at the Black Sun, from which 2 bonus tracks appear here.

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Some rights reserved. Please refer to individual track pages for license info.

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Sjambok Music Cape Town, South Africa

This is a store front for various difficult to find not very commercial South African recordings. We specialize in 80′s agit and Afrikaans art and punk wave , Uk/SA Dubstep right thru to Cape Town hip hop and Kwaito . All are legit downloads.

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