Эндрю Миллер (ЮАР) - Dub Steps

‘Watch it, Rus, watch it!’ Grandfather Barnaby barked.

‘Jesus, Dad, we have to go left here. It’s Soweto, not the dark forest.’

‘Just watch it’s all I’m saying. Friends of mine got lost here – ended up God knows where…’

Born into a wealthy family of timber farmers in the Natal Midlands, Barnaby Fotheringham had conspired to lose his farm, his fortune, his self-respect and pretty much everything else thanks to an unreasonable attraction to the fine sport of polo. The great loss of the Fotheringham fortune wasn’t much discussed in our family, for obvious reasons, but from what I could gather the nut of it was that Barnaby had underestimated the time his father, and his father before him, had spent on the farming part of running a farm. He left the technicalities to the farm manager, who in turn left much of his load to his manager, and so on. When the timber market collapsed, Barnaby returned from the polo fields to find the outer shell of a business – the insides had rotted away. All he had left was a stable of ponies.

Thus, Russle was born a rich kid. He left high school a middle-class kid, and he dropped out of university to pursue his cricket career the son of a living cautionary tale.

As I headed down the N1 in my armoured van, loaded up with supplies and jerry cans of diesel, Barnaby’s voice echoed in my head. ‘Just don’t go too far left. The Bloem slip road is the same as the one to Soweto. You have to go left, but then straight. Left then straight.’

I let the wheel drift left, then pulled straight. The rain smashed on the van’s armoured window, turned into hail and smashed again.

The N1 south was simultaneously reassuring and evocative of all the things I was trying not to think about. Orange Farm loomed up on the right, the township veneer familiar. On the left, Vanderbijl Park and Sasolburg, the cooling towers also reassuring, yet ominous in their lack of vapour. How many times had I travelled this road in my life? Fifty? Eighty? A hundred even?

Just after crashing through the lowered boom at the Kroonvaal toll plaza (another in an ongoing set of satisfying armoured van experiences), I stopped in a sunny post-storm spot on the highway and considered my father’s music collection, contained within a very old, brown cardboard school suitcase, my name stencilled in big, childlike letters on the lid.

The loss of the cloud – disconcerting in many ways – was most disruptive in terms of access to music. I was constantly patting my pockets, expecting contact. I carried my mobile in hope, but it lay silent, flashing the connection-failure notice ad infinitum, Bambi looking for his mom. Which meant my life’s music collection was scattered across the now dissipated cloud. Few of the cars, players, glasses or devices I had picked up along the way had anything in their memory banks aside from playlists; requests for beats lost to the sky.

The first cover in the suitcase had my father’s hopeful spider-writing scrawled over the front. ‘Schulz – Demo Mix 1 – Final,’ it read.

Two tightly folded A4 email printouts fell from the jewel case as I opened it.

Thanks Markus. That’s exciting. I’ll get something through to you asap.

Best

Russle

-----Original Message----

From: Markus Schulz [mailto: markus@coldharbour.com]

Sent: Friday, June 19, 2011 4:28 PM

To: Russle Fotheringham

Subject: Re: great

I think send me a sample of what you’re thinking. It’s best to have the conversation revolve around something tangible – if we’re both listening to the same thing we can make appropriate decisions.

Let me know when you’re ready and we can Dropbox it. We might need to get you over to Miami to work on it when the time comes…

Peace

markus

On 17/06/2011 4:05 PM, Russle Fotheringham wrote:

Thanks markus – that means a lot, coming from you. Delighted you enjoyed it as it was a bit of a departure for me.

I’m actually putting together an odd kind of mix at the moment. Plays with some of the ideas that came out in the Cape Town set, but maybe in a more steady, hook-filled way than that gig, which got a little wild and broken.

If you like it, it could be a good project to explore?

Lemme know

r

-----Original Message----

From: Markus Schulz [mailto: markus@coldharbour.com]

Sent: Friday, June 12, 2011 3:45 PM

To: Russle Fotheringham

Subject: great

russle

just wanted to say wow. Wow wow wow. That set last friday at Immortals. It just blew me out of the water. Completely unexpected and weirdly beautiful. And I see and hear a lot of sets.

I’m looking for something fresh for Coldharbour. Would you consider a project within that realm?

Let me know, and thanks for the experience

markus

19 June 2011.

My father was dead three months later. He had never mentioned the Schulz exchange to me, but then I was simply a son, riddled with emotion and judgement. It would have been safer to keep quiet.

The emails explained a lot. I had always wondered about the sudden swing to trance. More than being annoying, which it definitely was, it was also odd. Russle Fotheringham had always been a deep house man. Throw in a few breakbeats and some of those slower hip-hop thumpers and that was him really. Deep house. And then suddenly, just before the end, he was all trance.

I put the disk in the front loader.

I left the CD box and printouts on the passenger seat, along with the mementos I had culled from Eileen’s flat, all stuffed, together with various last-minute additions, into a large green Woolworths carrier bag. A few of her old shirts, a blue skirt, a bottle of old perfume and a newish-looking pair of white panties I had found in the back of her cupboard.

At the bottom of the Woolworths bag was a small chequered wallet I had pulled from behind her underwear while rummaging. I unzipped it. Inside, a stuffed plastic baggie of what looked like very old weed, a matchbook from a hotel bar (the Balalaika, of all places) and a totally out-of-proportion, scrunched-up, king-size Rizla pack.

Weed.

A tingle of excitement, rooted in my early HHN balcony days with Mogz, the only time I had properly engaged with grass… a time when its jagged whack to my psyche felt more thrilling than dangerous. I zipped the wallet back up and flipped through Eileen’s CDs.

Bobby McFerrin.

The Pet Shop Boys.

Bump Volume 3.

Peter Gabriel.

Deep Forest.

Eileen must have been several years older than I had always thought she was. Either that or she had inherited her father’s music collection, in toto.

Fun Lovin’ Criminals.

I extracted the weed wallet again and rolled a terrible, mangled joint as the first run of angelic voices came together at the trance crossroads. The girl voice began to sing: ‘There’s something in the air / Baby, we just don’t care / I see you in the mist tonight / Thula thula baby, thula, alright / We sleep / Tonight…’

There was some relief, I thought as I rolled the joint, in knowing that my father hadn’t simply lost his musical mind towards the end, but was rather working on career progression with a famous Germanic-American DJ. It gave him credibility – something he needed a lot of with me. I particularly enjoyed the tiny slip of vernacular into the vocal. The girl sounded as generic as trance girls always did, but that one word – thula – gave the track a touch of something different. Mr Schulz would surely have loved it.

Stalks poked through the spit-addled mess of a joint in several places. There was no discernible end to the construction, so I just stuffed it in my mouth, holding fingers and thumbs over as many of the holes as I could and burning my right forefinger badly in the tussle with the matchbook.