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Nigel Wrench // ZA87 TAPE

Nigel Wrench // ZA87 TAPE

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Dead stock of tapeworm under the long-established British sound label Touch has arrived.

This is a new work released by South African journalist Nigel Wrench in March 2021 in a limited edition of 3. Midsummer of 100,Record a day in South Africa during the apartheid eraContains a 30-minute audio document.It is already out of print.

Labels and other works  ///Click here to see more The Tapeworm releases available at Tobira. 

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Edition of 100. Sold out at source.

The Tapeworm:

"The dusty streets of apartheid-era Soweto, 27 July 1987. The politically charged funeral of a young activist who fled South Africa to became a commander in the military wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Police await in armoured cars. The funeral is restricted by specific government decree.

The man being buried is Peter Motau, assassinated in neighbouring Swaziland on the orders of South Africa's most notorious government-sanctioned killer, Eugene de Kock, orders carried out by his secret police unit in a bloody ambush.

For the singing, chanting mourners at his funeral, he was a freedom fighter, a hero from the streets of Soweto itself. For De Kock and the apartheid government, Peter Motau was a terrorist.

ZA87 is a raw audio document of one extraordinary day under apartheid. A father mourns, himself breaking the regulations declaring any political statements at the funeral illegal. Young activists, the “Comrades”, sing in praise of the banned ANC's military wing, sirens blare , helicopters hover overhead, a police officer orders all television and photojournalists to leave. Nigel Wrench's microphone remains. Also there is Winnie Mandela, on behalf of the ANC's exiled leadership. Banned from speaking at the funeral, she speaks instead into Wrench's microphone and stages a remarkable intervention as the police seek to detain activists.

The authorities sought to keep the events of that day away from the eyes and ears of anyone who wasn't there. ZA87 breaks that silence.

Nigel Wrench is an award-winning journalist whose career began in South Africa under apartheid. He is the winner of a Sony Award for “Out This Week”, BBC Radio's first national lesbian and gay news programme, and a New York Radio Award for BBC Radio 4's “Aids and Me”, chronicling his experience of living with HIV. “Few journalists have quite so intimately captured the essence of their era's great moral panics as Nigel Wrench” (The Quietus).

ZA87 is the follow-up to Wrench's acclaimed first cassette on The Tapeworm, ZA86, “a remarkable documentation of South Africa under apartheid in 1986” (Boomkat), “chilling and at times stunningly beautiful” (The Quietus), “stylistically not dissimilar” to Adam Curtis's 2015 documentary'Bitter Lake', its hypnagogic float through the rushes feels curiously vivid, free of the dating or distancing effect further media packaging might bring ”(The Wire).”

Artist: Nigel Wrench

Label: The Tapeworm

Dead stock of tapeworm under the long-established British sound label Touch has arrived.

This is a new work released by South African journalist Nigel Wrench in March 2021 in a limited edition of 3. Midsummer of 100,Record a day in South Africa during the apartheid eraContains a 30-minute audio document.It is already out of print.

Labels and other works  ///Click here to see more The Tapeworm releases available at Tobira. 

----------------------

Edition of 100. Sold out at source.

The Tapeworm:

"The dusty streets of apartheid-era Soweto, 27 July 1987. The politically charged funeral of a young activist who fled South Africa to became a commander in the military wing of Nelson Mandela's African National Congress. Police await in armoured cars. The funeral is restricted by specific government decree.

The man being buried is Peter Motau, assassinated in neighbouring Swaziland on the orders of South Africa's most notorious government-sanctioned killer, Eugene de Kock, orders carried out by his secret police unit in a bloody ambush.

For the singing, chanting mourners at his funeral, he was a freedom fighter, a hero from the streets of Soweto itself. For De Kock and the apartheid government, Peter Motau was a terrorist.

ZA87 is a raw audio document of one extraordinary day under apartheid. A father mourns, himself breaking the regulations declaring any political statements at the funeral illegal. Young activists, the “Comrades”, sing in praise of the banned ANC's military wing, sirens blare , helicopters hover overhead, a police officer orders all television and photojournalists to leave. Nigel Wrench's microphone remains. Also there is Winnie Mandela, on behalf of the ANC's exiled leadership. Banned from speaking at the funeral, she speaks instead into Wrench's microphone and stages a remarkable intervention as the police seek to detain activists.

The authorities sought to keep the events of that day away from the eyes and ears of anyone who wasn't there. ZA87 breaks that silence.

Nigel Wrench is an award-winning journalist whose career began in South Africa under apartheid. He is the winner of a Sony Award for “Out This Week”, BBC Radio's first national lesbian and gay news programme, and a New York Radio Award for BBC Radio 4's “Aids and Me”, chronicling his experience of living with HIV. “Few journalists have quite so intimately captured the essence of their era's great moral panics as Nigel Wrench” (The Quietus).

ZA87 is the follow-up to Wrench's acclaimed first cassette on The Tapeworm, ZA86, “a remarkable documentation of South Africa under apartheid in 1986” (Boomkat), “chilling and at times stunningly beautiful” (The Quietus), “stylistically not dissimilar” to Adam Curtis's 2015 documentary'Bitter Lake', its hypnagogic float through the rushes feels curiously vivid, free of the dating or distancing effect further media packaging might bring ”(The Wire).”

Artist: Nigel Wrench

Label: The Tapeworm