The Ghosts That Haunt Us – Review of the New Album by hoffman Musik für Kopfhörer/ Musiek vir Oorfone/ Music for headphones/ Post-Protestant Afrikaans Pop

When listening to the new album by hoffman you are going to need some time: it slowly burns through all 19 of the tracks on the playlist. The songs are not written in the ubiquitous 3’.44’’ format of commercial radio play. They feel like pop songs, but keep on falling out of the conventional songwriting format of much current pop and thematically dwell in places where few Afrikaans artists like to venture. You need patience to find the unexpected deviations and turns that eventually surprise you after each song slowly unfolds over the course of its duration. The recording quality is uneven – clearly recorded in the artist’s living room – and in places the reverb and dense layering of tracks in the songs feel as if it threatens to overwhelm the listener, but the songs are refreshingly unfinished and rough – with the rawness of the recordings actually contributing to the emotional afterglow experienced in the music. The album is definitely more accessible with headphones: Musik für Kopfhörer, tatsächlich. It is a collection of songs that needs to be heard with the head first and then the heart will also be able to hear. The album title, sero (from the root in words like serum or serology) and the accompanying blood splatter on the album cover, is indicative of the corporeality of the album’s overarching theme. sero has been written and put together like a concept album around a few prominent themes: memory, identity, language, displacement and forgiveness; but it is the recurring theme of blood that sculpts the mood of so many tracks on the album. Not just the red liquid gushing through the arteries and veins of humans and other vertebrates, but also its figurative meanings and its associations with violence, passion, illness, knowledge, genetics, kinship, race, memory, language, health, sin, initiation, evolution and redemption. Blood is not just a carrier of oxygen, it is also full of the ghosts that haunt us. All these things, accummulating over generations, end up sitting in the bone marrow and it is only in the words uttered in our languages, that we sometimes see the shadows of the things, past and present, haunting us in our blood. sero also plays with the notion of the number zero, as a point that is neither positive nor negative - a kind of nothingness or a kind of balance. Or simply, just a starting point – a place to begin again, when the positives and negatives cancel each other out. The struggle to make peace with a hateful history without, in doing so, maintaining the very latent mechanisms or societal structures of privilege and discrimination that allowed for that history to come into existence in the first place and to make peace with your own memories even though they were, by their very nature, created out of the pain and loss of millions of other human beings, sits at the heart of this album and burns through in the songs. One has to first reconcile yourself with your own story: nothing should be disowned or forgotten. Own it, because we can’t change the past: just take responsibility for it and change yourself and therewith create different possible futures – if that is what you want.

Each song has its own cover and cover art and creates a unique and separate sonoric space, without becoming isolated in the album’s larger topography of literary, political and historical references and imagery: the Bushveld and Waterberg regions of the Limpopo province in South Africa, a Dutch Reformed church in Bela-Bela, the white suburbs of Pretoria, the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, Koeberg nuclear power plant near Cape Town, Fukushima Daichi in Japan and the city of Berlin, Germany; the medieval Dutch morality play, Den spyeghel der salicheyt van Elckerlijc (een verhaal die vertelt over hoe een mens zalig kan worden, dat wil zeggen hoe hij zich zo moet voorbereiden op de dood dat hij toegang krijgt tot de hemel); a nod to the elegiac short story Rust- Mijn-Ziel: ‘n Aandgesang, memorializing a childhood farm, by Afrikaans author Hennie Aucamp; Flemish author Marnix Gijsen’s “Telemaque” running naked through a poplar forest in parochial Flanders, acting out ancient scenes from Homer’s Odyssey; Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus, with Orpheus losing the past forever every time he looks back at Eurydice or singing with the dead as he occupies the double realms of life and death; Jesus, Darwin and Mohammed. sero’s soundscape is further deliberately sculpted by Christian imagery that is being transformed into Post-Protestant understandings or interpretations: houses build on sand – like the fragile homemade recordings of this album; the author as a man walking on water; discovering the holy trinity of light, shadow and darkness in oneself; the Pentecostal quality of the rainbow-colored choir celebrating the Blessing of the Holy Spirit as a rediscovery of our common Humanity; the (dead) author rising from the grave of his own life and rediscovering the body as manifestation of the Logos. As I have said, it is a slow burn. The album shifts from Afrikaans into Sepedi and into German and back again. It forces the listener to move with it and for the listener with some time on hand, sero will become an adventurous journey through a soundscape that is proudly and responsibly iterating new meanings of Afrikaansness:

en ek voel skielik afrikaans in been en murg, want ek is ‘n mozambieker, ek’s ‘n aidspasiënt, ek’s ‘n boer; ek’s ‘n moslem, ek’s ‘n plaaswerker, ‘n verbruiker en ‘n hoer; ‘n zefhol, ‘n kugel, ‘n drag queen, ‘n bediende en ‘n baas – iemand se weerlose ouma op ‘n plaas. en as ek ophou wroeg oor dit wat was, ophou vra of ek êrens pas – (dan) voel ek of ek ook van myself kan hou1

from constitutional hill and waar ek pas

1 and I suddenly feel African in bone and marrow, because I am mozambican, I am an aids-patient, I am a boer; I am a muslim, I am a farm worker, a consumer and a whore; a commoner, a Jewish girl, a drag queen, a domestic worker and a boss – somebody’s vulnerable grandmother alone on a farm. and when I stop the soul searching and questions about where I belong – then I can also actually start to like myself. (from the songs constitutional hill and where I belong)