Left-field weirdos

mistakes. “The important thing about composers like [Richard] Wagner and [Franz] Liszt,” he says, “is not just the music they made, but all the various fictions circulating around that.”

Barry goes on to say: “We need people — whether critics or composers or other artists — to make these kinds of stories and confabulations up, to make mistakes and get things wrong.

“People should be abusing each other’s work, jamming it up against things it wasn’t supposed to go anywhere near — just as we’d expect artists to use technology in ways it wasn’t intended for, against the grain of its manufacturer’s intentions — because often that’s where new ideas and new directions come from, from failure and misuse, and general misapprehension.”

Future Sounds of Mzansi

does a great deal to distil the mythical and historic elements of electronic music in South Africa into a cohesive narrative. The thing with narratives, however, is that they must necessarily leave out certain voices and aspects while embellishing and exaggerating others. They place events, movements and people next to each other in ways that may not be historically accurate.

For Barry, this is not a flaw of narrative creation but rather a strength. For him, it’s important that we misapprehend and mistell. This is part of myth creation, which is necessary to understand music and take it forward.

I don’t think the problem is that we, as South Africans, are incapable of appreciating innovation in our local sounds, but rather that we are still developing the tools and opportunities to do so.

In places where we do have appreciation, it has been largely left up to artists to develop their own myths, such as in the Spoek case.

To take it further, we need more critics and more writers and artists adding to a historical, perhaps mythic, narrative through which we can understand our present and our future. Such is the power of mythmaking.