:pronounced COO-DISH-NY-OW (ku:di:?nja:a?)

Transcription

1 :pronounced COO-DISH-NY-OW (ku:di:?nja:a?)

2 :just a what? HELLO! We are a collective named Just A Band. Originally formed by an animator, a musician and a photographer, a lot has happened since we got together as an escape from dull classes in University. We re interested in a whole bunch of different areas, and we ended up applying a very DIY approach to our projects; producing the music ourselves, and handling the design, production and distribution of our first CD (called Scratch To Reveal ) in We made a couple of videos, too; unfortunately, they were deemed too futuristic for Kenyan TV, which led us to putting them out online and gathering a following in the Kenyan diaspora, who were pleasantly surprised to find a local band playing electronica and referencing science fiction. Because of the warm reception to the first album and the off-beat visuals, Goethe-Institut Nairobi asked us to do a video art exhibition. We agreed to do it, and we called it TRNSMSSN. It went down well with young people who usually avoided staid art galleries, we had groups coming in over their lunch break to spend time just absorbing the work. Soon after, we begun to play live gigs and hold raucous DJ shows, and we put out our second album a year later (called 82 - after the year in which the three of us were born, during the infamous August 1982 coup in Kenya). We were mighty surprised when the first single from the album - Usinibore - showed up and stayed at Number 3 in the Top Ten of the We Are Hunted online music aggregator, which was a big deal for us.

3 We got signed by Akwaaba Music who re-released our album in the US in February, and then in March we released the video for our second single from 82, a song called Ha-He. The video starred a character called Makmende - dimly remembered from our childhood - and to our surprise, the video became some sort of phenomenon in Kenya. It was referred to as Kenya s first viral internet-meme, and we landed on CNN, the Wall Street Journal and Fast Company because of it. Later in the year, our good friends at the Goethe- Institut once again invited us to participate in a German-Kenyan musical exchange program they called BLNRB. We got to collaborate with German electro-musicians such as Modeselektor, Jahcoozi and the Teichmann Brothers on the BLNRB album - which will be out this March - and we ve just come back from a series of shows in Berlin and Cologne. Great fun! It s been quite a trip so far, we ve learned a lot and are even more excited about the intersections between our different fields and interests, and participating on a more global platform... and we want to broaden out and share something of our experience and worldview with a broader audience, in a more interesting way.

4 Just A Band are Blinky Bill, Daniel, Jim and Mbithi. DANIEL: Daniel plies his trade as an illustrator and animator. Currently his work can be seen regularly in the Shujaaz comic book pullout that appears once a month in the Saturday Nation newspaper. He is also a member of the band, and finds it an interesting case of dual personalities to go from the solitary nature of working alone slaving over a hot computer, and the much more outgoing nature of jumping around onstage while playing people songs. BILL: Bill is a full time musician and producer and the Music Director for Just A Band. He plays guitar, bass and harmonica and will most often than not be found fooling around with his samplers. He is the one likeliest to purchase unusual instruments like banjos and ukuleles. He is also very passionate about African art and politics and helping change the rest of the worlds perception of the two. JIM: Jim Chuchu is a photographer and multi-media dabbler, who has exhibited his photography and video pieces in exhibitions hosted by the Centre for the Contemporary Art of East Africa (CCAEA) and the Goethe-Institut Nairobi, created documentaries for the Changamoto Arts Fund and created stylized imagery for clients like Virgin Atlantic and Samsung. MBITHI: Mbithi Masya joined the Just A Band squad in 2007 as a visual collaborator. He began as an advertising director at Young and Rubicam, and was the Creative Director at ZK Evolve before moving into film as a director. He co-directed several Just A Band videos and has directed music videos for other artists, and is currently working on a feature film with Jim Chuchu (for Kuweni Serious - a non-profit civic engagement program they co-founded).

5 Enter KUDISHNYAO! KUDISHNYAO! (pronounced COO-DISH-NY-OW (ku:di:?nja:a?); from an onomatopaeic sound that has been shouted on Kenyan playgrounds for years) - is the title of our second video-art installation that we intend to run in the US, the UK and Kenya. KUDISHNYAO! is a little more technically ambitious than our first show was - it will use 6 parallel audiovisual streams to tell stories of fate, love, deceit and escape; with a cast of terrorists, dancers, victims, survivors and lovers. See the general layout below: This setup allows the audience to perhaps understand the stories differently depending on what they look at, and it provides a chance for us to play around with the setup in many ways: spatially, musically and visually. For instance, one of the pieces shows six people in different places, all listening to the same radio station on their earphones. They all start to sing along, forming an unwitting acapella performance to the audience. We also plan on holding supporting concerts that will feature our performances and DJ-sets during the show s run. Will you help us get this show out there?

6 Connect with us on our Facebook and Twitter pages, or read about us on Wikipedia.