Bye Beneco: Weird, but in a good way

30 January 2015 - 02:20 By Yolisa Mkele
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NO LABELS: Bergen Nielson, Jenny Dison, Lenny-Dee Doucha and Matthew Watson, not pictured, make it up as they go along
NO LABELS: Bergen Nielson, Jenny Dison, Lenny-Dee Doucha and Matthew Watson, not pictured, make it up as they go along
Image: ALON SKUY

If you had to describe Bye Beneco's latest music video, Chemirocha, in one word, it would be psychedelic.

Released on Monday, it looks and feels like a colour-bombed, Frida Kahlo-themed tumble through the world's happiest open-air asylum.

In many ways it's the right representation of a band whose genre is so difficult to describe it has adjectives twisting themselves into knots.

"We try not to label our sound, partly because we think genres are limiting and because we don't know what to call it ourselves. Our music has been called all sorts of crazy stuff from Gypsy folk to psychedelic prison blues," says band member Bergen Nielson.

Like the band, the story behind Chemirocha is a strange one. It begins in a small Kenyan village in the 1950s, when members of the Kipsigi tribe came across some records of US singer Jimmie Rogers yodelling. Convinced that such a sound could not be human, they determined that Rogers' voice was that of a half-man half-antelope spirit they called Chemirocha. The villagers sing hymns in his honour and Bye Beneco decided they would pay homage to these villagers by doing their own rendition of one of their hymns.

Oddity is something that comes naturally to the band. Their live performances typically include trippy light shows, more place swapping than a swingers party and a host of unidentified musical objects, including something called a guiro.

"During the recording process we realised that we were unconventional because we didn't follow any of the traditional structural rules. People would say our stuff is kind of ADHD because it was all over the place," says Lenny-Dee Doucha, the band's lead vocalist

"At one point [during the recording process] we got so carried away that our producer picked up the mat under his chair and started waving it around to make a weird sound. So now if you listen carefully to the album you can hear a mat in the background," says co-vocalist Jenny Dison.

The band's glistening strangeness is mesmeric and represents a broader pull in the music industry towards the peculiar. The vortex of cultural and musical influences that the internet era has unleashed has meant the radio and our social circles are not the only fridge in which musical tastes can be set.

Bye Beneco - and other artists such as FKA Twigs and Petite Noir - have managed to parlay their eccentricities into a rising tide of popularity built on their own terms.

"It doesn't matter if some people don't like our songs or if we're not radio-friendly or commercial enough. We're doing something we're passionate about. There is something liberating about not having someone constantly looking over our shoulders and that allows us to constantly keep creating new stuff," says Dison.

''There's a freedom of expression with an instrument and knowing that anything from a table to running water can be music. This is what gives our music its spark."

Until recently, the music industry was suspicious of weirdos - and the risk associated with them may have warranted it.

But the democratisation of access to music on the internet has turned that on its head, giving those who like music to serve up the unexpected a band that speaks their language.

  • Their album 'Space Elephant' is available on iTunes
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