British Forum for Ethnomusicology

Sound and Circulation: Immobility and Obduracy in South African Electronic Music
Author(s): Gavin Steingo
Source: Ethnomusicology Forum, Vol. 24, No. 1 (April 2015), pp. 102-123
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology
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 Ethnomusicology Forum, 2015 ¡1 Routledqe
Vol. 24, No. 1, 102-123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17411912.2015.1020823 !K Routledqe Taylor & Francis Croup

Sound and Circulation: Immobility and

Obduracy in South African Electronic
Music
Gavin Steingo

This paper responds to the common assumption in much recent ethnomusicology that
today music is more accessible , ubiquitous and mobile than ever before. In particular ,
I argue that this assumption runs aground when confronted with sonic practices in South
Africa. Based on fieldwork with electronic musicians in Johannesburg and its surrounding
areas , I ask how music is practiced and experienced in a context where musical equipment
and storage devices constantly break down and where people are largely immobile. I focus
on four factors: the physical layout of urban spaces; the immanence of crime and theft ; the
breakdown of musical equipment; and the interruption of information storage
and transfer. By examining these factors , I elucidate the ways in which breakdown ,
obduracy and failure have generative as well as negative effects on music production and
experience.

Keywords : Circulation ; Failure ; Obduracy ; Soweto ; Electronic Music

Introduction

The relationship between music and mobility has been a central concern in
ethnomusicology for at least three decades. From studies of migration and diaspora
(Bohlman 1998; Ramnarine 1996; Slobin 1994) to examinations of circulating
instruments (Turino 1993) and recordings (Manuel 1993), ethnomusicologists have

Gavin Steingo is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh. He completed his PhD in the
Anthropology of Music at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 and from 2010 to 2012 was a Mellon
Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University. His research interests include African music (particularly southern
Africa), music and politics in post-revolutionary societies, labour and performance, and the anthropology of
sound and listening. Dr Steingo has published papers in numerous journals and edited collections. His book
Kwaito's Promise : Freedom and Aesthetic Experience in South African Music is forthcoming from University of
Chicago Press. Correspondence to: Gavin Steingo, 110 Music Building, Department of Music, University of
Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA. Email: steingo@pitt.edu

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 103

long illustrated the profound ways in which music moves between and across spaces
and cultures.1
Recent studies in auditory culture have engaged innovations in music technology,
from car sound systems and mobile listening devices (Bull 2000, 2001) to P2P file
sharing (Sterne 2012) and streaming platforms (Manabe 2014). These studies tend to
emphasise music's increasing ubiquity, availability and fluidity (see also Gopinath and
Stanyek 2014; Kasssabian 2013). Music, it seems, is more accessible than ever, moving
at an ever-faster pace in an unimpeded flow.
In this paper, I argue that while the aforementioned recent studies have contributed
useful insights, several key assumptions about music and mobility run aground
when confronted with sonic practices in South Africa. Based on fieldwork with
electronic musicians in Johannesburg and its surrounding areas, I ask how music is
practiced and experienced in a context where musical equipment and storage devices
constantly break down and where people are largely immobile. The context that I will
describe cautions us against overly optimistic, technophilic approaches to music and
mobility; at the same time, it raises a number of important theoretical concerns. For
one thing, it is important to recognise that technology does not advance in a linear
or teleological fashion. By this I mean that while technological innovation may
overcome limitations or imperfections, innovations also often produce new failures
and accidents. For example, as Paul Virilio (1999, 2006) famously pointed out, the
invention of the train was simultaneously the invention of the railway accident; the
invention of the automobile, the invention of the car crash (see also Morris 2010).
A second important concern is the theoretical status of failure. As Brian Larkin
(2008: 219) observes, social scientists have tended to focus on cases in which
technology works at an optimum. Ethnomusicology, for example, often emphasises
the establishment of communities (Turino 2008) and scenes (Gerstin 1998; after
Straw 1991), the creation and maintenance of technologically mediated national or
transnational communities (Erlmann 2004), and the affirmation and reshaping of
individual and collective identities through audio technologies (e.g., contributions in
Wittkower 2008). In most cases, music is presented as a labile and fluid medium that
swiftly mediates the production of new subjectivities, and technological innovation is
viewed as enhancing the reach and scope of music's affective powers. But what
happens when music does not facilitate as much as it disables? What happens when
music does not move as much as it gets stuck? I examine a musical context where
obduracy is far more common than mobility;2 where people and musical information

lrThis preoccupation with mobility is not new, of course, and can be traced all the way back to the comparative
musicologists, who presented detailed accounts of musical diffusion (Schneider 1934) and the migration of
musical instruments (Sachs 1940). Another important precedent is the acculturation theory of the 1950s (e.g.,
Waterman 1952). It is worthwhile pointing out that, generally speaking, ethnomusicologists became less interested
in movement and circulation between the 1960s and 1980s. Adopting a functionalist 'music and culture'
paradigm, most texts produced during those decades focused on how people use music in individual cultures.
2The word 'obduracy' best captures the dynamic that I am describing. Implying a kind of unyielding inflexibility,
the word 'obduracy' is derived from the Latin ob (against) and durare (harden). As a verb, then, 'obdurate'
means 'to harden against'.

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104 G. Steingo

are constantly bulwarked, jammed, blocked. Beyond simply noticing the empirical
ubiquity of failures and blockages in urban South Africa, I also argue that
breakdowns, obduracies and accidents have generative as well as negative effects.3
For, as Larkin (2008: 219) reminds us, 'technology influences through its failure as
much as through its successes'. I therefore pay close attention to the aesthetic and
sensorial consequences of technological failure, and I illustrate that constraints on
musical circulation have definite social and aesthetic effects. In doing so, I join a
growing number of scholars who eschew grandiose generalisations about the fluidity
of music and sound, and who instead listen carefully for failures (Larkin 2004, 2008),
frictions (Tsing 2004), echoes (Muller and Benjamin 2011), feedbacks and bottlenecks
(Novak 2008, 2013), and crises at the conjuncture of infrastructure and political
subjectivity (Skinner 2012).
Drawing on my fieldwork in South Africa, this article focuses on four factors: the
physical layout of urban spaces; the issues of crime and theft; the breakdown of
musical equipment; and the interruption of information storage and transfer. By
examining these factors, I illustrate the ways in which breakdown, obduracy and
failure have generative as well as negative effects on music production and experience.

Background to the Study

This paper is one part of a larger project that examines the position of music, audio
technologies and aesthetic experience in post-apartheid South Africa. I have written
elsewhere about the formal music industry in Johannesburg (Steingo 2008). Here, I
focus on my interactions with non-professional musicians in Soweto, South Africa's
largest urban ghetto located about 20 miles from the metropolis of Johannesburg.4
During apartheid, which ended officially in 1994, Soweto was a key site of political
activism and came to represent South African struggles for freedom and emancipa-
tion on a global level. Although I grew up in Johannesburg in the 1980s and 1990s, I
had only visited Soweto once before I began conducting serious research there in
2008. Because of South Africa's long history of racial segregation, Soweto continues to
be inhabited almost exclusively by black South Africans, with whites mostly residing
in neighbourhoods north or east of the city centre. When I lived in Soweto for a year
between 2008 and 2009, I was one of approximately three white people in an area
with a population of 1.3 million.
Soweto was originally created by the ruling white minority of South Africa as a
collection of contiguous areas to the southwest of Johannesburg with the purpose of
housing black workers. Areas housing non-whites came to be known as locations or

3I omit studies of music censorship in this article primarily because they tend to present censorship as purely
negative and not at all generative. Note that while several contributions to the edited collection Popular Music
Censorship in Africa (Drewett and Cloonan 2006) do actually provide examples where censorship has generated
new musical forms, this is never stated explicitly.
Future publications will examine the relationship between the commercial music industry and non-professional
township musicians. See also Steingo (2010).

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 105

townships. Note that although Soweto is often described as a township, it is actually a

collection of several contiguous townships.5
Residential segregation along racial lines began already in 1908, when municipal
authorities ruled that only black people working as domestic servants could live in
white areas.6 The anxiety surrounding black bodies is clearly illustrated by the fact
that in Johannesburgs early years residential planning was the responsibility of
health authorities, while non-residential aspects of native life were administered
by the same committee responsible for the zoological gardens (Maud 1938 as cited
in Mbembe and Nuttall 2008: 20). Although blacks were legally forbidden to
live in white areas after 1908, the law was seldom implemented because mixed
neighbourhoods were convenient for workers and profitable for property owners.
The first black township (Klipspruit) was established in 1905, but the population in
this area remained small for decades, while slum yards in or adjacent to white areas
continued to mushroom. Although initially unsuccessful, the first township none-
theless signalled the onset of a process that would accelerate in the next several
decades. Built about 12 miles from the city and adjacent to a municipal sewage
farm, Klipspruit was re-named Western Native Township in 1918. In the 1930s,
two additional townships were built to the southwest of Johannesburg: Pimville in
1934 and Orlando in 1935. This was the beginning of the southwest townships,
later named Soweto.

With the advent of urban apartheid in 1948, the state was no longer willing to
tolerate multi-racial residential areas. The government began brutally implementing
laws prohibiting mixed areas, most notably with a series of forced removals of blacks
from white areas. Several new locations to the southwest of Johannesburg were
created, including Zondi, Chiawelo and Senaoane.7 Apartheid, however, was not
satisfied with merely dividing people along racial lines. Using a classic divide-and-rule
strategy, the state categorised black people into ten subdivisions or 'national units'
based on linguistic families.8 These divisions were not entirely arbitrary, and
conformed - at least in some basic sense - to cultural patterns and geographical
origins. Nonetheless, apartheid sought to purify and rigidify the distinctions,
ultimately advocating the development of each ethnicity separately and along its
own course. In 1956, new townships built in Soweto were sorted by ethnicity: Naledi,
Mapetla, Tladi, Moletsane and Phiri were built to house those falling under the Sotho
language group, while Dhlamini, Senaoane, Zola, Zondi, Jabulani, Emdeni and White

5During apartheid, Soweto was a separate municipality, but today it is part of the City of Johannesburg
Metropolitan Municipality. The inclusion of Soweto within the Johannesburg municipality was largely a
response to anti-apartheid protesters in the 1980s who opposed unequal service in the white city and black
townships. These protesters demanded 'one city, one tax base' (see Wafer 2008: 100).
6The history of Soweto that follows is based in large part on the work of Bonner and Segal (1998).
In addition to these locations, migrant workers evicted from the city were housed in a hostel in Dube.
Sotho was divided into North Sotho (also known as Pedi), South Sotho (also known as Basotho) and West
Sotho (also known as Tswana). The Nguni family group was divided into Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, Shangaan, North
Ndebeli and South Ndebeli. Vendas formed the only group consisting of a single language.

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106 G. Steingo

City were built for speakers of Nguni languages (i.e., Zulu, Xhosa, Ndebele). Venda
speakers were assigned to Chiawelo.9
Soweto was built in a tightly structured manner, with each township comprising
rows of identical, so-called matchbox houses on a plot of about 260 square metres
(Beali, Crankshaw and Parnell 2003: 200). Although houses were built in a highly
structured way, their layout was intentionally 'extraordinarily inefficient' (Tomlinson
et al. 2003: 6). For the security of the regime, roads were constructed to make internal
circulation difficult. All major roads lead directly to centres of employment or retail,
while within the townships roads circle around, stop in dead ends and make travel
generally quite frustrating. Circulation within a single township is not always
particularly difficult, but to move from one township to the next - even when the
two townships are directly adjacent to one another - is often extremely cumbersome
and frustrating. A. J. Christopher summarises this spatial logic in his Atlas of
Apartheid :

The [urban planning] guidelines proposed that group areas be drawn on a sectoral
pattern with compact blocks of land for each group, capable of extension onwards
as the city grew. Group areas were separated by buffer strips of open land at least 30
meters wide, which were to act as barriers to movement and therefore restrict local
contact. Accordingly, rivers, ridges, industrial areas, etc., were incorporated into the
town plan. Links between different group areas were to be limited, preferably with
no direct roads between the different group areas, but access only to commonly
used parts of the city, for example, the industrial or central business district. (1994:
105-6)

The original apartheid layout of Soweto can still be clearly felt, where a distance of
one mile as the crow flies often requires that one traverse several miles. Consider, for
example, the journey from Levubu Street in Naledi Extension 1 to Halolo Street in
Mapetla. The journey is 3.6 miles, although the distance between the streets is only
0.6 miles (see Figure 1).
Soweto has, of course, experienced dramatic changes since the demise of apartheid.
The nature of these changes is best articulated through Manuel DeLanda's (1997)
observation that there are two main ways in which urban areas are constructed: either
as pre-planned assemblages organised from the top down or as self-organising
systems with no central decision-maker. Clearly, Soweto's early development was
determined by the former method. That is to say, the apartheid state designed Soweto
very rigidly, incorporating modernist planning principles, including a unique
interpretation of the work of Le Corbusier- an interpretation that took quite literally
his emphasis on the relationship between formal planning principles and social
behaviour (Haarhoff 2010). However, although Soweto was originally planned and
built in a very top-down manner, it soon yielded to processes of immanent self-
organising. As early as the 1970s, housing shortages led to overcrowding and the
construction of shacks in backyards. At this time, however, Soweto was still closely

901der townships like Orlando and Pimville remained ethnically mixed, although this was simply considered an
imperfection that would ostensibly be sorted out at a later date.

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 107

1 * - ' -'PM&fèmÊî
. v- ; . fci>^

♦y^JMorth&łi // jp- / •*-. JL^xx

f#^i»SÉÉÉi ♦y^JMorth&łi // jp- / •*-. JL^xx

Figure 1 Route from Levubu Street (A) to Halolo Street (B) (© Google 2010).

monitored by apartheid police and informal housing remained limited. In 1978, only
1% of properties had backyard shacks. Shack life exploded in the 1980s, when Soweto
became far more difficult to control because of increased protest against the apartheid
regime.10 By 1987, 40% of formal houses had at least one backyard shack and 23%
had a formally built 'garage' that was inhabited by subtenants (Beali, Crankshaw and
Parnell 2003: 200). By 1997, there were nearly as many backyard shacks as there were
formal houses in Soweto. The anthropologist Adam Ashforth comments on these
changes in his ethnography of Soweto:
The severe crenellations of the original streetscape, bare but for the symmetrical
rows of 70,000 "matchbox" houses, softened as trees grew, outhouses sprang up,
and, after the administrators lost control, the mass-produced dwellings were
expanded to fit the comfort and means of their occupants. (2005: 23)

What is interesting about these organic processes is that they have not eclipsed the
basic regular structure of the original Soweto. Shacks are built onto the highly
organised scaffold, but the scaffold remains. Informal, bottom-up organisation has
been unleashed within and on top of the framework of formal modernist planning.
Today, each original township has a population density three to four times higher
than was intended, but the matchbox houses remain, as do their backyards.

10In the 1980s, the aim of township protests was to 'render South Africa ungovernable' (in the words of Oliver
Tambo).

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108 G. Steingo

Creativity and Music Production in Contemporary Soweto

The post-apartheid processes of self-organisation, embedded in the original rigid

construction of Soweto, have led to a complex space that is highly conducive to
particular forms of creative practice. Although Soweto has developed fairly
'chaotically' in the post-apartheid period, these immanent processes are hinged to
the basic original structure of restricted access and limited mobility. Each township is
home to dozens of musicians and other creative people, but these people are still- to
a certain extent - trapped, noosed and bulwarked in their respective areas. Of course,
not all people are equally trapped, which is to say that immobility is not equally
distributed amongst men and women, adults and children, the able-bodied and the
disabled. What follows is a partial account of musical life in one Soweto
neighbourhood; certainly, a more comprehensive analysis would require greater
attention to a wider array of intersectional dynamics.
Because most people in Soweto are not formally employed, they generally spend
most of their day wandering around the neighbourhood and visiting friends. In such
a context, individual houses become nodes of communal creativity and in this paper I
will focus on one such node: the home of Sizwe, my friend and primary interlocutor.
Each day of the week, at least ten musicians visit Sizwe's house. People from the
neighbourhood come by to borrow equipment, play a bass line over something Sizwe
is working on, write some lyrics or exchange music, movies and ideas. On some days,
people will stay for six or seven hours at a time; on other days, they drop by for only a
few minutes.

Sizwe lives in a formally constructed room, adjacent to a main house, on a typical

plot of 260 square metres owned by his mother. His mother, sister and two nieces live
in the main house. The main house and Sizwe's room share a gate leading to the street,
which is locked only at night. It is generally considered discourteous to lock one's gate
during the day, as friends and neighbours may want to stop by. In most cases, at least
when residents are home, house doors remain unlocked or even standing open. Sizwes
house is therefore not, properly speaking, a private space. In many ways, it is an
important node in the musical and informational network of the township.11
For reasons I will more fully explain later, Sizwe often does not leave his room for
weeks at a time. And largely because of the physical construction of Soweto, when
Sizwe does leave he does not go far. Generally, he only walks to a local grocery store or
to a nearby friend's house. When people are walking outside and are asked 'Wenzani?'
['What are you up to?'], they almost invariably respond 'Ngishaya e-rounď ['I am
walking around'] or 'Ngiya lapha no lapha' ['I am going here and here']. Notice that the

11 When I lived in Soweto, I was advised not to lock the front door if home during the day. In the mornings, I
would often look up from a bowl of cereal or a book, only to find a middle-aged man named Jan peering down
at me. Having let himself him, Jan would then ask: 'Where's the bread?' On one occasion, I came home to find
that I had been burgled- my computer, hard drive and some money had been stolen- and that the thief had
broken out of the house from inside. My friends reasoned that the burglar had snuck inside while I was still
home (with an unlocked door) and that when I went out and locked the door behind me, he or she was forced to
break the lock to exit the house with my belongings.

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 109

latter expression is not 'lapha no lapho' ['here and there] but 'lapha no lapha' ['here
and here]. To move 'here and here: this is a perfect articulation of township space.
Like most Sowetans, Sizwe generally makes music with whoever lives nearby.
Because of the conditions of immobility and sedentariness, each township is a musical
topology, a space of musical possibilities.12 In other words, we are speaking of
immobility and obduracy but also of what I will call an aesthetics of propinquity , in
which musical praxis is largely determined by who and what is physically near. The
topology of each township is circumscribed and narrow; one might say that it is
aggressively partitioned. At the same time, immobility has definite generative effects
on musical creativity. It is therefore a mistake, as I have been commenting, to think
about immobility only in terms of lack - that is, as not being mobile. Instead,
immobility makes as many things possible as impossible. What I am calling the
aesthetics of propinquity would not be possible without a very particular arrangement
of township space in which a finite group of musicians perform together in different
permutations for extended periods of time.
To more clearly elucidate (and nuance) the scenario I am describing, I offer an
ethnographic vignette. On a Tuesday in March 2009, I was at Sizwes house playing
guitar over an electronic MIDI 'track' that he had recently produced. It was a typical
track, comprised of a basic four-on-the-floor synthesised drum rhythm, an ostinato
bass riff and two higher-register synthesised layers filling out the I-IV-V-I harmonic
progression suggested (or at least afforded) by the bass line. At around noon there
was a knock on the (already slightly open) door and I called out 'Ngena ['Come in'].
Four young men entered and we exchanged greetings. They had brought a few quarts
of beer and Sizwe went across to the main house to fetch glasses. Together, the six of
us drank beer and smoked cigarettes. A few people smoked marijuana. When the
men entered, Sizwe had hit the 'loop' icon on the digital audio editing program and
the track reverberated repeatedly. The track itself lasted about 20 seconds, but while
we talked, drank and smoked it continued to play, incessantly turning back on itself
and beginning again. Finally, after about 30 minutes, or roughly 90 repeats of the
track, someone began to sing. Soon, someone else joined in. Over the duet, another
young man began 'chanting in Zulu. Sizwe was seated in front of the computer, and
he began playing with the digital equaliser, cutting various layers out of the mix and
then adding others. I picked up my guitar and began to improvise a few licks.
Before long, I had come up with a riff that I liked. I repeated it over and over again,
transforming it subtly, experimenting with the timbre and inflexions. Sizwe was
mixing the track, listening carefully and feeling where we all wanted the music to go.
After about 20 minutes, the six of us were singing together:

Life is easy if you take it day by day

There's no need to complicate your life, ok

12I use the term 'topology' in a rather metaphorical sense. Nonetheless, my use of the term corresponds roughly
to DeLanda's characterisation: '[A] space is not just a set of points, but a set together with a way of binding these
points together into a neighbourhood through well-defined relations of proximity or contiguity (2002: 22;
original emphasis).

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110 G. Steingo

Life is easy if you take it day by day

There's no need to complicate your life, no way!

Neither these simple words, nor the melody that accompanied them, were the
creation of any single individual in the room. Instead, they emerged from a
concatenation of creative input from six individuals sharing sonic and physical
space. But even though the words, in a sense, 'belonged' to all of us, and even though
we mainly sang these words together in unison, each individual voice exceeded the
words and melody. After all, each human voice belongs to a singular body, which is
unique in its fleshy materiality. And as Adriana Cavarero (2005) has observed, it is
primarily through the material body and the fleshiness of the voice that uniqueness is
disclosed (see also Dohoney 2011).
We sang those simple words for nearly an hour, taking short breaks here and there to
drink, smoke and chat. The four visitors were all unemployed and were in no hurry to
leave. Like many people who roam Soweto's streets on weekdays, Sizwe's guests had
nowhere that they needed to be. Minutes, hours and days blur into each another. In
Sizwe's room, we sang those simple words over and over. People were laughing,
experimenting with their voices, stopping to take a swig of beer or inserting various kinds
of 'chanted' vocalisations. Indeed, a substantial amount of time passed before we all
started to feel lethargic, and before the beer bottles ran dry. Sizwe turned the instrumental
track down and we resumed talking. Slowly, the crew that arrived at noon began to leave.
On other days, Sizwe's sister and a few of her friends would join us. Together,
we watched movies, listened to music and again performed for extended periods of time
over constantly repeating electronic tracks, taking short or long breaks to drink, eat or
smoke. I also had the opportunity to make music with guitarists, bass players and keyboard
players. Because of the construction of township space and the limitations on mobility that
I have outlined, I mostly encountered the same 40 or so people repeatedly, although never
all together at one time. Instead, different permutations of these 40 people - in groups
from two to eight individuals - visited Sizwe in his room. Although the motivation for
these visits differed, there was almost always an element of musical performance.
The basis for every performance was an electronic track, looped without pause for
as long as five hours. In many cases, Sizwe produces his own tracks late at night when
he is alone, but it is not uncommon for him to produce tracks collaboratively with
friends. Furthermore, Sizwe's room is a key location for the exchange of electronically
produced tracks- a practice that I describe in greater detail below. The existence of
such tracks is perhaps the most fundamental condition of possibility for any musical
performance. And importantly for this account, the maintenance of these tracks is
dependent upon a functioning storage device (a hard drive, for example) and the
requisite computer processer to transform stored information into sound.13 In what

13By using MIDI, musicians in Soweto are not so much 'recording' sound as they are storing digital signals. As a
so-called 'control format', MIDI stores performance instructions for the computer and not a digital version of
'recorded' sound. On the other hand, it is worthwhile pointing out that musicians in Soweto also use formats
such as MP3, WAV and AIFF. On the MP3 as a format, see Jonathan Sterne's (2012) already classic study MP3 :
The Meaning of a Format.

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 1 1 1

follows, I explain why and how this dependence on technology both constrains and
affords musical praxis.

On Immobility and Theft

Theft is a major contributor to immobility in Soweto. On a general level, crime is one

of the most crucial structuring elements of South African sociality (see Comaroff and
Comaroff 2006; Steinberg 2001)- indeed, horror stories of murder and rape in South
Africa's major cities are prevalent in the international news. I bracket more violent
forms of crime in order to focus on the less aggressive and more banal practice of
household theft. Consider Sizwe again. As I learned, he seldom leaves his home
because he needs to protect his musical equipment. Sizwe has often expressed his
frustration to me, usually in the form of complete resignation, by saying: 'I am always
here. I am always at home. Nonetheless, a couple of years ago a conspiracy was
carefully orchestrated to force Sizwe out of his house. Someone planted drugs in his
room one morning and an hour later a police raid occurred. Sizwe was left with two
options: go to jail and have his things stolen; or give the police responsible for the
case R500 (approximately US$50). With my financial support, Sizwe was able to pay
the R500 and the matter was quickly resolved. The plot against Sizwe was essentially
an elaborate bribe.

Sizwe only hesitantly and briefly leaves his house because he is concerned about the
theft of his belongings, and most importantly his computer - a device that not only
makes, produces and generates music and musical experience, but that also stores
vital information. What does Sizwe's extreme sedentariness say about a person's
relationship to things, about private property, about techne (or 'craft')? For one thing,
it implies that in Soweto a musician's computer is almost a kind of prosthesis - it
exists as a veritable extension of his or her body. In the absence of rigorous state
protection in the form of police, and with the 'deregulation of monopolies over the
means of legitimate force, of moral orders, of the protection of persons and
properties' (Comaroff and Comaroff 2008: 2), people tend to relate to their property
directly. In other words, private property is seldom mediated by the force of law.
Instead, there is an unmediated relationship between a person and a thing, where the
thing is owned through physical use. Thus, Sizwe can only be certain that his
computer is in his possession for the duration that he is actively engaging with it. The
moment he leaves his room or even falls asleep, his relationship to property
disintegrates.
Of course, the situation is even more extreme since property is often pried from
individuals through robbery and mugging. In these situations, too, things have a
prosthetic quality: since a thing belongs to an individual only when it is somehow
attached to the human body - for example, when it is in a pocket or grasped tightly in
the palm of a hand - that thing is configured as an extension of the body. Things,
then, do not belong to citizens in the form of private property as much as they belong
to human bodies that grip onto things or else protect them with physical force.

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112 G. Steingo

Surprisingly, although people in Soweto go to extreme measures to safeguard their

belongings, they often lend things out easily, without a second thought. In fact, people
not only lend things out easily, they often freely give them away. The reason for this
apparent contradiction is actually quite simple: lending is a social obligation.
Ashforth (2005: 32) notes that in Soweto 'people survive because others feel obliged
to share and support them as members of their families, as neighbors, and as friends'
There is an almost ubiquitous assumption, in fact, that resources will be distributed
'equitably and according to neeď (2005: 32). This does not mean that people lend
things or give them away happily or ungrudgingly. But it is uncommon to refuse a
genuine request if one can reasonably meet it.
On the one hand, then, property is treated as a kind of bodily prosthesis, but on the
other a person's relationship to his or her property is understood as fragile,
provisional or temporary. A Sowetan might guard a telephone, a hard drive or a
wad of cash with her life but then only a moment later give all of these things away
without a second thought when a friend knocks on the door and makes a simple
request. The giver may part with her belongings begrudgingly, but she will usually
part with them nonetheless because she knows - or at the very least trusts - that she
will receive the same treatment at a later date. To use Maussian (Mauss [1950] 1990)
terms, we could say that in Soweto any gift impels a counter-gift.
Thus, if Bernard Stiegler (1998) is correct that humans are always and already
constituted through their relationship with things (and tools), then the case of
electronic music in Soweto elucidates the multiple ways that they may be so
constituted. In other words, it is not simply the case that people first exist and only
then come into relationship with technical objects. Rather, to be human in a sense
presupposes an entanglement with non-human actors, a general scenario that Stiegler
terms 'technicity' (see also Gallope 2011). To say that humans cannot but engage the
tools, objects and technologies that make up their environments does not imply the
homogeneity of these environments. As my account shows, 'culture' is constituted
through heterogeneous environments where people form shifting alliances and
attachments with the things that surround them.
The way that people in Soweto relate to property also has profound implications
for the storage of information. As I have been emphasising, there is always the threat
that computers will be stolen. This happened to me during fieldwork - both my
laptop and my external hard drive were stolen, along with hundreds of photographs
and recordings. In fact, during the first three months of fieldwork I had four cell
phones and three cameras stolen. If I went out to a concert, usually my belongings
did not last longer than 30 minutes. So after a while I stopped bringing them, stopped
taking photographs, stopped making field recordings nearly altogether.
But I have also observed that there is another side to this story. Musicians are
obligated to lend storage technologies such as external hard drives and memory sticks
to friends. But external hard drives are not plentiful in Soweto. It is more common, in
fact, for people to lend hard drives from their own computers or even to lend the
computer itself. For example, Sizwe removed the chassis of his desktop computer

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 113

Figure 2 Sizwe's computer.

years ago. When a friend wants to copy information from Sizwe's computer, or when
Sizwe wants to transport information, he removes the hard drive from his computer
(see Figures 2 and 3). There were many days when I arrived at Sizwe's house to make
music only to find that a friend had borrowed his hard drive for an undetermined
period of time.
When storage technologies are lent to friends, and then to friends of friends, they
often get lost along the way. Furthermore, hard drives are more susceptible to theft
when they are being carried about than when they are at the home of their owner
and under his or her watchful eye. Finally, hard drives that circulate among an
always-expanding network of people are liable to break or get viruses. Thus,
recording - and not only performance - is transient. The archival impulse is
replaced by the inevitability of continual loss. ťTo live in South Africa', write Sarah
Nuttall and Liz McGregor (2007: 12), 'is to be subliminally primed for major loss'.
In a place where 'the accident has become normal' (Marks and Andersson 1990:
44), music production is a form of pure mediality, a process of means without
end.14

14I borrow the formulation 'pure mediality' loosely from Agamben (2000), although his meaning is quite
different from what I have in mind here. For Agamben (2000: 117), pure mediality is a politics that is 'neither an
end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is a sphere of pure mediality without end intended as
the field of human action and thought'. I use the term in a more overtly materialist sense.

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114 G. Steingo

Figure 3 Sizwe's set-up. Note the hard drive on the floor.

On Information and Technological Failure

Here it is necessary to recall Larkin's observation that technology influences through

its failure as much as its success. As he suggests, The inability of technologies to
perform the functions they were assigned must be subject to the same critical scrutiny
as their achievements' (Larkin 2008: 219). Hence, although I have been describing
technology use in Soweto in terms of difficulties and problems, the township context
also enables alternative aesthetic forms. For example, it is not uncommon to lend a
hard drive to a friend and have it returned weeks later with a wealth of new movies,
intimate photographs and instrumental tracks. These photographs may be of
unfamiliar faces and the tracks of unknown origin. But the person in possession of
the hard drive often adds new layers to the tracks and then lends the hard drive out
again, setting in motion the process of digital accumulation once again. In this way,
the failure of smooth information transmission generates a particular cumulative
creative process that might otherwise not exist.
On one occasion that I witnessed, a neighbour visited Sizwe's room to download
movies from Sizwe's PC directly onto a laptop. When Sizwe requested something in
return, the neighbour dug around on his computer until he found a few electronic
tracks. This neighbour could not recall where he received these tracks from or who
created them, but Sizwe happily accepted them in exchange for a few movies and

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 115

spent most of the afternoon playing with them, tweaking the various instrumental
layers and adding a few of his own.
This process happens with hard drives but also with other devices such as cameras.
For example, when I lent my camera to a friend a couple of years ago he returned it a
week later with dozens of photographs saved on the memory card. It would be
unethical to reproduce such pictures here, but I will simply say that my camera
picked up some very intimate moments on its brief excursion.
In his discussion of Nigerian film, Larkin focuses on the aesthetic forms generated by
reduplication. The films that Larkin analyses are copied from tape to tape and, as is the
case with any analogue format, the content degrades with each copy. 'Constant copying
erodes data storage', he writes, 'degrading image and sound, overwhelming the signal of
media content with the noise produced by the means of reproduction' (Larkin 2008:
218). In this way, Nigeria's informal networks of copying and distribution produce 'a set
of formal qualities that generate a particular sensorial experience' (2008: 218). It is often
said that with the advent of digital information the problem of content degradation had
been solved, and indeed theoretically this should be the case. After all, the successful
duplication of digital information requires nothing more than the faithful transmission
of a string of binary digits. Nonetheless, digital storage does not necessarily prevent
corruption of files - in fact, I have many MP3s from friends in Soweto that contain
glitches, pops, abrupt silences and crackling sounds. According to Microsoft's official
website, 'It's very rare for a file to become corrupted' (Microsoft 2014). Nonetheless,
Microsoft (2014) tells us, there are several ways that file corruption can happen: 'The
most common way it happens is when something goes wrong while a file is being saved.
For example, the program saving the file might crash, or your computer might lose
power just as the file is being saved'. These 'very rare' situations are actually very
common in Soweto. Computers - which are often many years old and have gone
through several rounds of repairs - crash frequently and hard. Additionally, since about
2008 South African citizens have become all too familiar with rolling blackouts and
power failures. Power loss is a regular occurrence in South Africa, and Sowetans, in
particular, do not find this a 'very rare' occurrence. In brief, statements about technology
in Europe and North America cannot be easily translated to the Global South.15
In contrast to analogue malfunction, in which degradation takes place incremen-
tally with each copy, digital malfunction tends to be unanticipated and rather
dramatic. As Jonathan Sterne (2009: 64) observes, 'digital files do not age with any
grace'. But graceful or not, digital malfunction also has very particular sonic
characteristics. Analogue degradation tends to muffle sound by smoothing the
divisions between sonic events. Digital malfunctioning, by contrast, generally results
in glitches, crackles and pops that disrupt or spike the sonic texture (see Prior 2008).
There is therefore a particular aesthetics of digital failure, which differs markedly
from analogue formats. Digital aesthetics, it seems to me, are redolent of what Virilio

15This is perhaps Larkin's most important insight. See Larkin (2004, 2008); see also Larkin in Edwards
et al. (2011).

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116 G. Steingo

(2009) calls picnolepsy: a general 'epileptic' state of consciousness produced by gaps,

glitches and 'speed bumps'. These miniature accidents are congenital to modernity
but are perhaps only fully realised with the onslaught of the digital.
Throughout this paper, I have shifted the emphasis from the content of music (e.g.,
pitches, harmonic structures, rhythms) to the infrastructures of musical performance
and the ways in which people and musical information either move or do not move.
Of course, this does not mean that content is irrelevant: as I have shown,
photographs, electronic tracks and other pieces of digital content move about Soweto
in multiple ways- as gifts, accidental transmissions or perhaps even as 'accidental'
gifts. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasising that infrastructures and modes of
circulation in Soweto are not simply conditions of possibility for music; rather, they
have profound consequences on the way that music sounds. My aim, in other words,
is not simply to show how people use instruments and technology to make music or
to explain how music moves through infrastructures. Instead, my argument is that
instruments, technologies and infrastructures have sensorial and aesthetic effects -
precisely at moments of failure, breakdown and obduracy.
Consider, for example, a simple two-bar electronic track that Sizwe produced. An
orthodox transcription would present this track graphically as shown in Figure 4.
It is quite possible, based on this small transcription, to make a number of
speculative analytical observations. For one thing, the synthesised guitar part on the
first staff produces what a rock musician would call 'power chords' - that is, a root and
fifth without a third (see Walser 1993). The use of power chords immediately raises a
number of questions, since in contemporary South Africa rock music is associated
primarily with whites.16 One may therefore ask whether this electronic track is an
appropriation, or even subversion, of white styles? A different analyst may zoom in on
the second chord (a D power chord) and point out that the low D is below the range of
a guitar in standard tuning. This observation might bring up issues of the relationship
between synthesised guitar sounds and the guitar itself as an instrument. For example,
would it matter to an electronic musician if she was using guitar sounds below the
range of a standard tuned guitar? Does digital technology 'free' the user from such
concerns and, if so, does this mean that technology is potentially liberatory? Finally,
it would of course be possible to analyse the rhythm. Do the bass drum accents on beats
two and four imply an association with Brazilian samba music, perhaps? And might
this association, in turn, have something to do with samba's African 'origins'?
All of the above questions are potentially both meaningful and interesting. But if
one actually listens to the electronic track- or at least to the MP3 that I copied from
Sizwe's computer - it is evident that some extremely significant sonic events take
place that are not susceptible to orthodox analytic procedures. What one hears first
and foremost on this massively corrupted file is a series of breaks and ruptures that
tear through the sonic fabric. Figure 5 presents a spectrogram of a 14-second excerpt

16In fact, one of my interlocutors told me that in the 1980s any music associated with whites was referred to as
'rock'. Of course, this association is based only on contemporary musical preferences since, after all, rock music
was developed largely by African-American musicians.

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 117

Guitar fi ļ ^ . - ■- ~ - I - I ļ

Bass Guitar J' ' *1 FF FF V ř ř FF ^ mm mm *1 - - -

"o'* LIJI liji LIJI " 11

Snare Drum -H - ^

Hi-hat II I 7 - j>< 7 j* - 7 - j>< 7 j>< - HT - V

Bass Drum hH - ^ ^

Figure 4 Orthod

from the MP3. T

in the sound. Th
but instead resu
one hears above
infrastructure.17

I do not know
corrupted files
intentionality do
Many aspects of
or intention,
networks.18
The constant disassembling of hardware and the subsequent circulation of its
various parts also implies a particular relationship to the technological apparatus. The
nature of this relationship is most forcefully brought to light when compared with
other music contexts in South Africa. Consider, for example, Louise Meintjes' seminal
ethnography of a professional recording studio in Johannesburg. Meintjes (2003: 73-
4) argues that ťthe quality of the space can come to be constructed and experienced as
magical and as a fetish by music-makers who work within iť. By 'fetish', she means a

17In a sense, the spectrogram invites us to listen beyond structure (see the contributions to Dell'Antonio 2004).
At the same time, I am less interested in the 'postmodern' preoccupation with listening beyond structure than
developing an expanded approach to structuration that takes into account the generative effects of failure and
the agency of non-human actors.
Although I cannot develop this idea fully here, I point out as an aside that the musicians with whom I worked
cannot be equated with musicians who intentionally produce failures. The issue of 'intentionality' is very
complex, however, since in certain genres practitioners often deliberately develop technological set-ups that they
cannot control (see Novak 2013; Prior 2008).

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118 G. Steingo

Figure 5 Spectrogram of an MP3 excerpt.

ťreif[ied] . . . object that can procure for those who have earned access to it the services
of that force, or "spirit", lodged within it'. In addition to seeing the entire studio space
as a kind of fetish, Meintjes points out that certain technological devices take on
magical qualities through the invisibility and relative unavailability of their processes.
Thus, when the voice of a black female vocalist named Joana is encapsulated by a
recording console, Joana loses control over her voice and requires a male studio
engineer to access it (2003: 100). The relative inaccessibility of the voice inside the
machine, coupled with the more general mysteriousness of shiny interfaces
concealing intricate circuitry that can only be manipulated from outside, results in
feelings of alienation and awe. These feelings are exacerbated for those without
technical or scientific knowledge.
For many musicians in Soweto, prying open computers and other electronic
devices is a way of exploring technology. When I visited Sizwe in early 2012, his room
was scattered with literally hundreds of motherboards, hard drives, power supply
units and sound cards. Many of these component devices had been broken into even
smaller parts. The computers looked like so many carcasses, disembowelled and
gutted, and then strewn across floors, chairs and beds. Tm even opening things that
aren't meant to be opened', Sizwe proudly proclaimed. Indeed, manufacturers often
seal small devices such as chargers so that consumers are forced to purchase them
anew after breakage. But Sizwe was melting down plastic, sawing things open and
breaking down parts repeatedly. He insisted that nothing is invisible or concealed if
you crack it open and peer inside.

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 119

Sizwes experimentations with and on various technological devices are empower-

ing. By carefully studying motherboards, hard drives and other component parts, he
rejects the role of passive consumer. In fact, he is busy building his own computer
system that is more amenable to township use. Called the Ramputer (a portmanteau
of his English name, 'Ralph', and 'computer'), this device will not be constructed as a
self-sufficient or organic unit like a laptop. Instead, the Ramputer will be comprised
of easily detachable component parts: keyboard, screen, motherboard, power supply,
multiple hard disks and solid-state drives. Because the Internet is a rare luxury in
Soweto, Ramputers will exchange information by swapping detachable drives and
through Bluetooth technology. But in spite of its great potential, even the Ramputer
would not ensure the secure storage of information, musical or otherwise. It too
would exist in the circumscribed and precarious environment of Soweto where saving
or preserving anything is extremely difficult, perhaps even impossible.

Concluding Remarks

I have presented several reasons why we should be suspicious of technophilic notions

of musical circulation as an unimpeded flow. As my ethnography of Soweto suggests,
there are various reasons why music in the twenty-first century does not flow
unproblematically. In the context I have written about here, these include the physical
layout of urban spaces, the issues of crime and theft, the breakdown of musical
equipment, and the interruption of information transfer and storage.
There are three main reasons why ethnomusicologists often emphasise flow and
circulation over blockage and obduracy. The first, as I have suggested, is an implicit
and unthoughtful technophilia- that is, an assumption that technology is advancing
towards greater perfection. As it turns out, this assumption is wildly exaggerated and
relies on faulty theoretical assumptions. Second, most studies of musical circulation
are based on examples from Europe and the United States. Consider, for example, the
recent two-volume Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies (Gopinath and Stanyek
2014). With 42 chapters and over 1000 pages, this massive compendium does not
contain a single chapter on Africa. A third and final reason why scholars have
celebrated flow over obduracy is that music itself is often considered fluid and labile,
as something that moves easily and swiftly across borders and between spaces. But as
a musical ontology, this picture is limited at best. As this article has shown, music
does not always move with ease.
In South Africa, circulation is better apprehended in terms of obduracy than in
terms of flow. This is not difficult to illustrate. But my study also makes the more
important point that obduracy is not simply the lack of circulation. Instead, the
various kinds of blockage and non-circulation that I have documented lead to novel
forms of creative praxis. There is a fully fledged, albeit heterogeneous, aesthetics of
obduracy that is enacted daily in Soweto by people like Sizwe and his friends. More
specifically, I have examined several effects that are generated by and through
obduracy or failure: the aesthetics of propinquity (i.e., musicking of a finite cohort

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120 G. Steingo

within a circumscribed area), the ownership of musical equipment as a kind of bodily

prosthesis, the exchange of intimate images and sounds via hard drives, and the
glitches and gaps in corrupted files. While these examples are seemingly negations of
smooth and fluid systems, each example is simultaneously a productive singularity
with its own contours and affective dimensions.19
Furthermore, it should be clear from my ethnography that 'circulation' does not
merely describe a movement between people, objects and places. As David Novak
(2013) has convincingly argued, the process of circulation actually constitutes the
very sites through which that circulation traverses. The same, of course, could be said
of obduracy. When a person, technological device or unit of sonic information 'fails'
to move from one point to another, that failure often effects the points between which
it does not or cannot move. It is possible to state all of this more strongly: time and
space are not empty a priori categories ( à la Kant) that are then filled up with matter
and movement. Instead, the movement of material bodies constitutes - at least
partially - the architecture of spatio-temporality.20
Instead of simply celebrating music's ubiquity, availability and unimpeded
movement, my study presents a more complex and empirically-grounded picture
that includes a number of human and non-human actors such as township
musicians, urban infrastructure and computer hard drives. This emphasis does not
detract from the importance of music in people's lives. Indeed, I continue to
recognise music as a powerful social, cultural and political force- but not, I reiterate,
because it magically swirls all over the place. Instead, the case of Soweto shows that
music (or, more precisely, musicking) is a material practice that is subject to the same
obstacles and partitions as everything else.
My ethnography thus serves as a useful caution for any consideration of music and
politics. As Jacques Rancière writes more generally about 'the arts':

The arts only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are
able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with
them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parceling out of the
visible and the invisible. (2004: 19)

I contend that it is precisely because music does not, and cannot, break free from
material constraints that it remains a vitally important mechanism for negotiating the
complexities of contemporary urban African life.
Of what, finally, do these complexities consist? Soweto is a place of ubiquitous
musical praxis and flourishing creativity, where individuals constantly perform for
and with one another. But storing information is precarious and music circulates

19By 'affect' I mean simply the production of some effect or change. Although I understand this term generally
in the Spinozist sense proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), I employ it here rather loosely and
without necessarily taking into account the various recent critiques and modifications.
An extended account would recognise the multiple ways in which space and time are 'produced'. See, for
example, David Harvey's (2009) Lefebvre- inspired conceptualisation of absolute, relative and relational space
(where the third type, 'relational', most closely matches the position I am developing in this paper). For an
excellent historicisation of the relationship between matter, space and time in the context of western music
theory, see Grant (2014).

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 Ethnomusicology Forum 121

without ever congealing; that is to say, without ever becoming a commodity that
might be distributed to people in other places, whether nationally or internationally.
For most people, making music is something that one simply does without any
particular goal. I have called this fluid state 'pure mediality' to emphasise its resolutely
materialist grounding. In Soweto, music is both an expression and consequence of
this grounding, of this obduracy that reveals itself finally as a generative failure at the
very centre of post-apartheid society.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ian MacMillen, Carol Muller, Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier and
Andrew Weintraub for comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I also thank Oberlin
College for an invitation to present this work in oral form.

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