LP + book – Nothing To Commit

Notes On Cuts is written and produced by art historian and scholar John Peffer, who, with a truly atypical and inspired approach, critically recalls the censorship perpetuated by the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), a public company that still administers state radio and television in that region. The release, which is out on Nothing To Commit Records, includes a 12” and a 46-page book in which the author contextualizes the collected songs all of which were recorded during the long season of apartheid. The original vinyls of these recordings were deliberately damaged by the censors, scratched to prevent them from being reproduced and broadcast over the airwaves. ‘I wanted to use my senses against censorship, exorcise the scratches by holding them close, rubbing myself against them and feeling their contours’ says Peffer and it is symptomatic that such a significant act of reappropriation took thirty years (that hateful regime of racial segregation ended in 1994). ‘The road to reconciliation is long’, said Desmond Tutu, and peace in South Africa was born from a strong awareness of the various social parties. In this case, however, we are dealing with real scars, on the black compactness of vinyl but also in the conscience of an oppressed class, which dictate the memory of those events. The sounds and notes of songs designed to be appreciated, celebrated and danced to, are imprinted by a shameful prohibition and re-proposed now with the same malfunctions caused by those earlier mutilations. Peffer’s textual notes contribute to an exact reconstruction of the facts, providing additional information and underlining how government decisions were taken precisely with the intent of exercising a form of control, even symbolic, over the population. This is certainly not the first specific study on censorship in South Africa, but the originality of his approach is undoubted. Over the years, Peffer has collected many of the copies that still bore the signs of that censorship: albums with markings like ‘SABC Bantu Diskoteek’ and ‘SABC Cancelled’, which survived the bans, but which nevertheless indicated that they had been withdrawn from normal distribution. It was decisive for the research that SABC had centralised everything, including the censored material, preserving every single copy. These archives have been methodically sifted through over the years by Peffer, who in the work presented here does not renounce a visceral and somehow more artistic rather than historical perspective, presenting recordings of materials that in a ‘normal’ context would be unlistenable – clearly in line with his aesthetic and cultural education.