"Right now my favourite South African album is Die Plesier Parade's Vonkvioole & Wasem. It's not afraid. It's about religion, depression and darkness -- a kind of forced expression of life's hardest puzzles. It breaks your head in two. It makes you think. Not everything works, but when it does, the soundscapes created take you on a tour of troubled-mind country. The closer, 15-minute-long Daar Is Net Een is spectacular -- a creepy, whispered nightmare in equal parts melancholic and frightening. When the CD player stops, you will be silent. Maritz van den Berg is the man behind it -- all the lyrics are his and sometimes the vocals too. But he rustles up a small army of other voices and musicians to help craft Die Plesier Parade's albums (the self-titled debut is possibly even better than Vonkvioole & Wasem)."
First published in the Mail&Guardian.
New Tearoom Books Titles
Gary Cummiskey's Don't Stop Until Incinerated is a short collection of poems that inhabit a desolate, disquieting place, a place in which the fabric of reality is threadbare. Cummiskey has mastered the art of minimalist unease, yet there are also moments of dark humour in these 26 starkly elegant poems, characterised by his iconoclastic surrealism.
New Tearoom Books Titles
30 Poems by Pravasan Pillay collects a selection of poems written mostly between 2003-2006 and published in South African journals. The themes of the poems are old, new and broken love; sex; marriage; failure; vanity; and quitting smoking.
Tearoom Books Titles
Loop is Tearoom Books' writing zine. It will be published primarily as free e-chapbooks. Issue 2 comprises a selection of poetry. Click on the cover for more information.
Tearoom Books Titles
Glumlazi by Pravasan Pillay, was released in January 2009. Glumlazi, Pillay's debut, is a collection of short poems, concerning revenge, sex and the blues. The majority of poems run no-more than two lines. Available at R40 including postage. For order information, contact tearoombooks@gmail.com
OTHER
(Book) Shaggy: 14 Rather Amusing Rambles by Anton Krueger and Pravasan Pillay. Second Print Run. Prepare yourself for a cast of some of the most manipulative, ingratiating, disillusioned, egotistical, inauthentic, spiteful narcissists operating in contemporary South Africa. Within these pages you will encounter fourteen first-hand shaggy stories told by a rogues gallery of scheming misanthropes whose speeches are full of sound and fury, signifying very little. These hilarious blowhards will make you snigger, cringe and wish your cousin had rather given you Spud 5 for your birthday. Published by BK Publishing. Price: R135. To order a copy write to: andrea [at] bkpublishing [dot] co [dot] za
