Ski Crime – ‘Watermelon Snow’
Cape Town’s 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 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 (even if Andrea currently lives in Milan), live performances often include only three members. Lockdown created an opportunity to work together at a distance, and Watermelon Snow exemplifies this new remote collaboration methodology. Independent label from Fargo, North Dakota, Black Ring Rituals (https://blackringrituals.com/) contacted Ski Crime to produce an audiocassette with new materials. The common interest for power electronics, experimental and harsh hoise made everything doable very quickly.