Original broadcast
Vuvuzelas and Sun Damage
By Warrick Swinney

Production: Deutschlandfunk Kultur/Goethe-Institut/Bauhaus-Universität Weimar 2023

Length: approx. 54’30

White pop against apartheid: this is how the South African musician Warrick Swinney became famous in the 1980s. Later he worked as a sound designer and sound engineer. Now he is composing an acoustic autobiography.

Warrick Swinney is a legend in South Africa. His band Kalahari Surfers was one of the pioneers of white anti-apartheid pop in the 1980s. Later he worked as a sound engineer, sound designer and composer for the artist William Kentridge, among others.

In “Vuvuzelas and Sun Damage” he conjures up the ghosts of the past: in a mixture of plunderphonics and autobiography, he tells what football trumpets have to do with holy trumpets and sunburn.

The composition was created as part of the Radio Art Residency Weimar, a joint project of the Goethe-Institut and the Experimental Radio at the Bauhaus University Weimar in cooperation with the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Radio Lotte, the EIGENHEIM Weimar/Berlin and the ACC Galerie Weimar.

Warrick Swinney, born 1958, better known by his stage name Warrick Sony, founded the band Kalahari Surfers in 1982. 2000-2018 he worked at Milestone Studios Cape Town in sound design and music production. Swinney explores the themes of silence, self-censorship and the tensions between politics and art in totalitarian states.