Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (English)

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Signal To Noise: sonic reflections on the South African transition period (1984-1998)
(University of the Western Cape, 2023) Swinney, Warrick; Taylor, Jane; Moolman, Jacobus
Background: This dissertation is set against the backdrop of my involvement with Shifty Studios, a small independent mobile recording studio based in Johannesburg, between 1983 and 1997. Most of this content is drawn from a wide range of reading across subjects generated from anecdotal discussions with involved musicians and friends; some alive, some barely alive and some spectral. The flimsy nature of some of these memories are sources for the creative nonfictional strands that help bind everything together; the aura of the absences contributing, almost metaphysically, to the overall ambience. “Rhizomic assemblage,” a term my supervisors and I bandied about during my MA at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, perhaps best describes my (de)constructive methodologies employed here. Early chapters address this together with the psychological self-searching that involved finding solutions to life-long learning disorders and taking strength from others with similar predicaments. David Byrne, in Chapter One, helps in reconfiguring my disorder into a ‘superpower’, while Osip Mandelstam’s advice to “make a wry face in remembering the past” (109) situates, for me, the human in the humanities.