Turning off the music would have been bad voodoo
TWO DARK girls drifted at the bar buying cocktails, one tall and pale with a Wednesday Addams sidesweep and a husky patter, the other taller, with an Angela Davis Afro.
In a fugitive move, so intimate it was hardly noticeable, Wednesday took a sip of someone else’s drink while she waited, covering her impish act with a giggle and a bite of the bottom lip.
On another night, in another place, there might have been a scene. But all flows reached out at Churn this weekend as a day-and-a-half of non-stop dance turned Kempton Park farm the Tweefontein Melkery into a party from the land of rare groove.
Designed by Andrew Clements of Kitchener’s in Braamfontein, and Riaan Botha and Colleen Balchin of Broaden A New Sound, the boutique beats festival lured 300-odd partygoers out of the city’s indifference.
Trans-Atlantic DJs Charles Webster and crunch-stepper Daedelus piloted a line-up from noon on Saturday till late on Sunday afternoon. Organisers had used virtual tools, graffiti and a bustling yellow Combi in the streets of Braam and Maboneng to get the local superstars on people’s tongues too.
Kid Fonque signed up to the collective, along with other big names like Durban’s Rudeboyz, maestros of the bony kwaito-hip-hop-house school of Gqom. All-South African onomatopoeia for hitting a drum.
DJ Danger Ingozi had warned partygoers to embrace their discomfort zone, and it was indeed a moment to leave any other dramas behind.
As Balchin explained it, the party came out of a desire not to turn the music off until everyone was ready to stop dancing. Otherwise, she said, it’s bad voodoo, with the organisers there to curate but not compromise.
Even the decor, set up by experimental festival supremos Hadedah, was mad and unorthodox. Set as it was on the old East Rand, the party needed kitsch, so they took it to the edge of kinky to please both the aesthetes and the freaks.
Shrines with found and random objects were installed to be things of rare delight. And inside the venue, the words, A good fortune is among us, were bannered above the dance floor to tease out the mood.
No one could say, but the rumour was that DJ Bob’s brother owns the Melkery, which is found on an elliptical orbit out of a love story.
Cloudy Road, 15 minutes from OR Tambo, is a sandy track filled with eyes in the night, leading, in fact, to a 150-year-old farm that has been in the family of the Labuschagnes and the Bothas since women wore bonnets and men rocked India rubber braces.
Churn and the Melkery offered a pop-up tale of how the Mzansi underground met Afrikaner history.
Originally set during the Tweede Vryheidsoorlog of the Anglo-Boer War, the farm was once the site of running rebellion.
Caught between the brutal expansionism of Lord Kitchener and the Boer guerillas as uitlanders poured in during the gold rush, it’s a postcard out of the bloodied old Transvaal.
The Melkery’s chapel – where Churn played dazed cinema all weekend – was the original farmhouse that was burnt down during the Scorched Earth siege.
A new farmhouse was built in 1906, and Terry Allan, son-in-law of the farm’s owner, has spent years renovating it.
In keeping with the good energy, there’s a flurry of birdlife too, headlined by a regiment of flamingoes at the dam.
Allan says three black swans “have pulled in”, and the bass are flourishing. When there’s no music at the Melkery, the East Rand Air Rifle club tramp its good earth to do target shooting.
Braamfontein’s nightlife was revived about seven years ago, when Clements turned the old Milner Park Hotel into prime real estate for DJs.
De Beer Street has never been the same since.
But Churn at the Melkery was not that. It could have been cursed by the weekend’s bad weather, but the rain and the chill only took the party deeper into the mystic.