SPAZA - UPRIZE! (VINYL)

In South Africa, 16 June 1976 is unanimously recognised as the definitive turning point in the tenor and intensity of the fight against apartheid. It comes as the internal capacity of the major liberation movements such as the African National Congress and the Pan Africanist Congress is nearly depleted; with many of its leaders in jail or in exile. Black Consciousness (BC) arises from these ashes and the apartheid regime scrambles to contain it in the form of assassinations, banning orders and trials. High school youths in Soweto, having already imbibed BC from their teachers (a group of newly-recruited university radicals), begin planning protests that would attain an incredible kinetic thrust. These demonstrations were supposedly to rally against the use of Afrikaans as a medium of instruction, but as student leader Tsietsi Mashinini says in the documentary film UPRIZE!, the situation in South Africa had been explosive for a long time and any issue could have delivered the shift in momentum that June 16 would symbolise.

This new SPAZA release is the original motion picture soundtrack of the film UPRIZE!, but it serves a parallel function. Recorded in Yeoville, Johannesburg, during a three-day improvised scoring workshop in 2016, the recording is almost the underside of...  more