Ski Crime
Bio
(Noise collective from Cape Town, South Africa - one member currently lives in Italy.)
As Is experimental music veterans Andrea Dicò and Garth Erasmus had a chat with two HNW dinmongers Justin Allart and Jacques van Zyl at a ROAR experimental music gig one evening and decided to team up as a noise collective. The name Ski Crime arose randomly during a wonky conversation about watermelons, an imagined murder on the slopes, and one that got away. A photo of the four sealed the deal.
Ski Crime’s concept has hereto been tacit – freedom is encouraged to an extreme, and implicit trust becomes the driving musical force. Chaos embeds structure, and language is individually coded and understood – but emerges as a whole.
The instrumentation is as anarchic. Much of it is self built and designed. Garth plays a number of his own stringed instruments based around Khoisan indigenous knowledge systems (notably the Zaan,) and Jacques carts around a growing bevy of food containers, housing primitive and often autonomous electronic objects. Aside from his drum kit, Andrea pounds on a kid’s drum set, along with toys, thrash metal objects, and various cheap and crappy accessories. Justin rattles a contact-miked can, filled with bolts and nuts, twisting his sound stream through an impressive collection of boutique pedals and electronic sound machines.
As all four members are seldom in the same country, live performances often include only three members. Lockdown created an opportunity to work together at a distance, and their C32 album Watermelon Snow exemplifies this new remote collaboration methodology.
Members
Andrea Dicò, Garth Erasmus, Jacques van Zyl, Justin Allart
Gear
Andrea: percussion, samples, gadgets, and drums
Garth: traditional southern African instruments, saxophone, zaan
Jacques: home-built proto-electronic effects and nerve nets, samples, laptop (Hamradio & PureData), iMac (Spongefork), cracked toy processors
Justin: noise box, effects and distortion pedals, no-input mixer, laptop, gadgets
Discography
SCHREEDS EP (2020)
con(E)volution EP (2020)
Watermelon Snow C32 album (2021 - Black Ring Rituals Records)
Contact
skicrime@gmail.com
