The day before the Unyazi Festival opens and some participants are already hard at work. Toni Olivier has arrived from the Eastern Cape with two mysterious black boxes containing her sonic art installations. These items are the pick of her exhibition from the National Arts Festival in July. Here she is in the Digital Arts Convent foyer steeling herself to open those mysterious black boxes.

Canadian sound-artist Maxime Rioux has been in JHB for the last two weeks collecting African instruments forhis automaton installation and performance entitled Unyazi (2005). He has assembled a large “orchestra” of drums, bows, harps, modified tin cans, and mbiras all carefully rigged with electronics which he will play through his laptop computer. With his deft additions of electrodes and wires he has converted these familiar African instruments into tiny surrealist machines.

He describes his work as “a kind of performance installation in which the body, objects and musical instruments are in systematic interaction with each other.” Here he is in the Wits Amphitheatre where he will perform his intriguing work on Thursday evening at 17:00.

One of the featured artists at the first Unyazi Festival of Electronic Music will be the great Egyptian composer, Halim El-Dabh. Now 84 years old, Prof El-Dabh was performing his first electronic works in Cario in 1944. This makes him a true pioneer in the area and a forerunner due serious respect. As part of that respect, the organisers have been trying to source a sine wave generator for him to use in his performance on the evening of Friday 2 September. Quizzed by email about the required specs for the device, Prof El-Dabh wrote: “Any instrument that can make a pure wave, and can glissando from lowest to highest. This is basically the simplest and earliest type of electronic instrument ever developed, probably about 100 years ago. Thus, a piano-type synthesizer keyboard is no good because it makes 12-tone individual pitches, no glissando. Even a keyboard with a pitch controller wheel can only glissando a few notes.”
Some serious hustling around Wits campus located such a device in the workshop of the Engineering School. With some background on the Festival and the needs of our illustrious guest, the Engineers kindly offered to loan their machine for Prof El-Dabh’s performance.

Here is the machine, built by BWD Instruments of Melbourne, Australia. Hopefully it will be what the Egyptian composer requires for his glissandos.