3 Mirrors to a shadow world – Gig promo video – by helo samo
Welcome!
Thanks so much for stopping by. With this being the first entry for this blog page, I thought it would be fitting to introduce myself, give some background and context for my choice of subject matter, concepts and creative style. I will be covering numerous topics in these blog posts from process work, ideas, music inspiration, to techniques, etc. For now I will give some history on where I’m coming from.
I grew up in a small neighbourhood pretty deep in the Cape Town marsh lands called Zeekoevlei, after moving from Mitchells Plain when i was 5. Everything felt so far away. The closest local shop was like a 45min walk away and all public transport, i.e. a mini bus taxi, was about the same distance, which you would still need to take to get to a train station. So, as a kid in this situation, you where surrounded by bush, a huge vlei (marsh land lake) and not many other kids. This was a huge start to developing my imagination and the first taste of what it was like to be an outsider.
Music and horror movies have a huge roll to play on my aesthetic as an artist. From around age of 4, I was magnetised to spooky things like, Nightmare on Elm street, The Excorcist and some elusive visual that i have of a helicopter camera shot over the ocean but pretty close-up so it goes by fast with the theme song being, “somewhere out there“. I will never know what this last one was or if it was even real. In grade 3, I made a pair of Freddy Kruger gloves using my winter glove and taping my sisters banana clips to them. I was walking around the school at the end of the day waiting for my dad to pick me up and a teacher called me into the class of older kids he was teaching to have me demonstrate the gloves that i had made. I think the teacher thought i was strange.
Mina-moo had these 2 baddies called “Bac” & “Teria” and those characters fucked me up so hard. Fear would set in when I knew the show was on and their theme song played. Deep & heavy moog synth chords brought them onto the scene. Intense anxiety followed. It was exhilarating. I also loved hearing strange folklore from older cousins about ghosts and all sorts of creepy things. Little did I know at the time that mental illness is a horror story of its own with our family. At age 9, being the only kid in my school that enjoyed heavier music (thanks to my older sister) and just generally being drawn towards darker things was so much fun to me – evil witch craft goodness and metaphysical terror. I was Clearly outside of the status quo and could feel the uncertainty coming from the other kids. By age 10, death metal caught my attention and I was immediately loving it due to its rawness and nothing else i could have heard before on the TV or radio. Then hearing Tool for the first time when they released their 1996 album, AENIMA, was like another door had opened. This is also by far my favourite album that Tool had released. My early teenage years brought me to nature as autonomy of movement became more possible, embracing the ocean for the surf & the mountain for its solitude. There was no turning back for me acknowledging that the wildness was so organised in its chaos. These were the stepping stones to the artistic expression that I have today.
My interest in creating music also developed as i got older. My earliest memories of being attracted to the creation of music was being exposed to my cousin’s Casio keyboard around the age 4 or 5. I also always enjoyed using a tape recorder to mess about, cutting lots of random sound bites together. Then my sister got her first accoustic guitar when i was around 9 / 10. I would wait for her to go out and then pluck around and found out how to play, “Something in the Way“, by Nirvana on one string. It blew my mind to find out that it’s possible to create this way. Music can be such a strong tool to pull you into a nostalgic place if done a certain way. This is why creating atmosphere and soundscapes resonates with me. It’s like on huge hit of fabricated nostalgia.
As time passed on, i became more aware of the obscure avenues of artists and musicians (Goodspeed You! Black Emperor, Hella, Palehorse, Khanate, Dirty Three & Primative Man to name a few), along with my growing interest in the human condition. Specifically, why do we cause so much pain but have this affinity to the beauty that life can bring? – sort of thing. I started reading up on psychology and philosophy, along with paying close attention to human behaviour within social settings. This is where i draw the biggest inspiration for the work i do across various expressions. Music & visual expression feed each other from the trough of human existence. Sometimes it feels like the most intense feeling of horror comes from the actions of humans, so, merging these 2 worlds is what i gravitated towards, while, trying to illustrate the darker sides of existence and attempting to find hope in a world of none.
There are so many details and reasons for why we do what we do, so this is just a prologue to the roots taking to their foundation.
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Leave a comment to share some of your influences and inspirations that helped shape your journey so far.
Take care till the next post.