Khodumodumo - What The Fuck Are You Doing This Side

A Closer Listen

The liner notes for Khodumodumo’s debut album, What The Fuck Are You Doing This Side, speak of an attempt to create a “horrific” listening experience. Much of what makes this bold album so unnerving and so riveting is the decision to create this experience from the violent and broken history of South Africa itself.

A welter of origin stories swirls around the Khodumodumo, a mythical monster from the culture of the Basuto (now known as the Basotho) people in Lesotho, a country contained within the borders of South Africa. The folktale predates South Africa’s murderous apartheid regime that was codified in the mid-20th century and lasted for nearly fifty years, and the Khodumodumo stands as a prescient and potent metaphor for a capitalist, colonial agenda and the violence required to support it. The monster’s predominant physical characteristic is an enormous mouth it uses to gobble up both humans and livestock until nothing living remains.

While WTFAYDTS plays out with the overall feel of a soundtrack, complete with snippets of what would otherwise pass for dialogue, what’s presented is more of a queasy-making, blood-drenched palimpsest of rasping electronics, cone-melting distortion, off-kilter, crippled rhythms, silences scraped raw – and voices. A hallucinatory, sonic kaleidoscope of voices: weeping in anger and confusion, disembodied and whispering in a void, making threats while drawing racial boundary lines. Voices at war with each other and with themselves.

The title track, “What The Fuck Are You Doing This Side_” pits the manipulated speech of aggressors, victims, and witnesses against a crumbling death-march beat. An anguished woman lamenting the destruction of her home is followed by an angry Afrikaaner talking about boundaries and what will happen to anyone crossing the line which is followed by “objective” reporters quoting facts about the general population, followed by a furious maelstrom of rioters. On “You Can Have Johannesburg With Love,” a man speaks of the importance of white people in South Africa defending themselves against the takeover of “their” land by Black people, saying, “my job is to defend my people against the idea to destroy my people.” Whenever the man’s voice cuts out, bursts of radio static and a squelched, strident chorus of opposition and shrieking pads, buttressed by ground-shaking thuds, kick in to fill the space.

Fittingly if discomfitingly, there is no letup or sanctuary to be found on the album, only an inescapable atmosphere of anxiety and dread. Which is entirely the point. The poisoned fog of “Dirge for the Ever-Watching Beings” is riddled with blasting triplets of brass that propel the track toward a haunted vacancy dusted with distant crowd sounds that suggest a kind of obliviousness to the horror near by. “Their Whistles Have Noticed You” captures an isolated subject, seemingly rowing a boat and whistling quietly for company, only to intrude on that fragile solitude with fraught keyboard stabs and more punctuating horn blasts. The empty space at the opening of “I Don_t Want to Be Here” is repeatedly torn into by corrugated rips, parched, disembodied exhalations, and dull, metallic thuds until that’s all that remains.

As legend has it, when the Khodumodumo was finally slain, the captives inside it were set free and returned to repopulate their homelands. What The Fuck Are You Doing This Side is a harsh, unrelenting, haunted album filled with pain and righteous anger. It’s also a record of suffering and the costs of necessary revolt. For a half-hour of music, it feels claustrophobically horrific. But the real horror it captures is the horror of reality. (Damian Van Denburgh)