Africa Open Improvising
Africa Open Improvising is a South African music collective affiliated with Stellenbosch University’s Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation.
Africa Open Improvising emerged in March 2020, adapted its activities during the COVID-19 pandemic, and explored various interdisciplinary research and creative projects.
Ethos
The group's ethos centers on inclusivity, welcoming anyone to join sessions, with a focus on sonic curiosity, listening, experimentation, and community-building. The collective maintains an open audience policy, allowing for walk-ins and interdisciplinary collaboration with visual artists, dancers, and researchers.History
Africa Open Improvising was initiated in March 2020 by improvisers Garth Erasmus, Esther Marie Pauw, and Pierre-Henri Wicomb. The collective's musicians have also included Jacques van Zyl, John Pringle, Carina Venter, Lize Briel, Cara Stacey, Antoinette Theron, Juliana Venter, Likhona Tokota, Mo Laudi, and Peter Baxter and Melanie Hufkie of the AMM All-Stars improvising collective, among others.During the COVID-19 lockdown, the collective adapted to online and hybrid performance formats, allowing musicians to connect across national and international boundaries. This shift provided opportunities to engage with digital technologies as creative tools and as a research endeavor, resulting in the group's discovery of 'Zoom-curated music.' Musicians used Zoom as a meeting platform, acknowledging time lagging and audio channel preferences. They recorded fragments of Zoom-related sound and later collated the tracks, resulting in compositions created by Zoom as an external curator.
Dissemination of Music
The improvised recordings by the collective are disseminated through platforms like the Internet Archive. Their recordings are also available for further open-source editing, manipulation, and sampling, without copyright restrictions. Audio recordings and written reports are archived by the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research, and Innovation for future access and research.Projects
The collective's activities include regular improvisation sessions and public performances at the Africa Open Institute and events organized by the Sonic Experimentation Network of South Africa. After the pandemic, a public concert at Pieter Okkers House in Stellenbosch was documented in a published article with film and audio online.In 2023, a collaboration with the London-based AMM-All Stars, facilitated by filmmaker Aryan Kaganof, led to a joint performance recorded as Slave Bell Quintet, which is available online. Xenochrony of shared tracks was radio-broadcast by Ben Watson (music writer) in London, underscoring the collective's openness to international collaboration.
In 2024, the collective engaged in a series of improvisations with a NAO-6 humanoid robot in a project initiated by the Goethe Institute, exploring cultural diversity in AI-humanoid interactions in African contexts.