Fear and loathing in District Six : Fallon Bowman
________________________________________________________________________________________________

With Amphibious Assault, Fallon Bowman has returned to the music scene in the most unexpected way. Yet, for her, the trip is all part of her personal musical evolution.

We were somewhere around Cape Town, at the foot of the Table Mountain, when the sound of bulldozers began to take hold. I remember saying something to Fallon Bowman like, ‘I feel a bit light headed. Maybe you should tell the story.’ Suddenly, there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what sounded like black metal Samoth riffs and Bowman was screaming, ‘I’m a huge Emperor fan. Every time I hear him play I want to cry.’

Once you get locked into a serious black metal collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. One toke over the line. One toke over the line.

‘Let’s give the boy a lift.’
‘What? No. Wait, we can’t stop here. This is black metal country.’

We stopped anyway. The bulldozers had surrounded us and there was nowhere to go except back, which, strangely enough, was the direction we were already heading. There was no point now in trying to figure out when things went wrong. Best just to talk about it and hope it all makes sense in the end.

They called this place District Six. It was an ethnic, cosmopolitan area – you know, priests and politicians, prostitutes and their pimps, midwives, merchants, gangsters, fishermen, the whole lot. Then, in 1966, the South African government introduced apartheid legislation and District Six was declared a whites-only area. For the next few decades the citizens of District Six were forcibly removed from their homes like rats, an extermination of human proportions. The sound of bulldozers.

Black metal is a soluble term. It’s music, sure, but what else is it? Like all music it’s a state of mind, no doubt. It’s also for us a starting point, a pigeonhole, where the past meets the present and human condition is put under a magnifying glass. I only say this now because we heard the riffs. If they weren’t roaring overhead then we might be discussing something else entirely. ‘I have a love affair with reality,’ says Bowman to me while staring at the boy. ‘I crave to know about it. I want to know about human behavior and why humans choose the paths they do.’

It’s the reason we are here, at District Six, locked into some mechanical roller coaster ride that operates on fallibility, all loops and buzzes. It’s part ancestry, part curiosity, part military, and part electricity. If you want to know the whole story, you put yourself into the story. Fallon Bowman is Amphibious Assault. Her new album is called District Six and it is itself destruction and rebuilding, sampled, morphed, the light of the future searching for the past in angular beats and eerie vocal harmonies.

She says, ‘I’m starting from scratch this time,’ a simple synopsis of her musical resurrection. Sebastian Bach was Jesus Christ. Paul Stanley the ghost. Bowman a bloodthirsty houseplant. The unholiest of trinities, idolized by god knows who.

‘I’ve always wanted to do musicals.’ When she said this, her head turned into a giant Venus Flytrap, its slithering tongue wetting the dashboard. ‘Holy shit,’ I yelled. The tongue was too much for me to handle. She used to play guitar in a heavy metal band and was now center stage as Audrey II in a high school rendition of Little Shop of Horrors. Little shop of horrors indeed. The fucking plant was talking to me. I guess that’s better than eating me. I could see the boy was scared.

‘I’ve sat down and tried to figure out what my path in life will be,’ said Bowman, whose head was back to its charming, smiling normality. ‘I’ve been so wrapped up in myself lately.’ Someone, somewhere, at some time far before mine, said that when one door closes another one opens. But don’t confuse doors with paths, the vertical with the horizontal, the old with the new. Maybe it was a foggy dream, but I remember Bowman saying she was interested in knowing why people choose the paths they do. So, why then did she choose the path she did? Goddamn it, inquisitiveness is addictive. Right then and there I felt like a fucking bulldozer.

But her building wouldn’t budge. ‘I don’t even mention that band. I’d rather just not talk about it.’ That band. I would mention them but the plant head might come back and eat me alive. That band. Peppered throughout the moment are pauses and sour faces, all of which indicate a self-inflicted memory loss of contemptuous proportions. If you listen carefully, if you strain your ear beyond the roar of black metal and the sound of the bulldozers, you can hear the cries of families being torn apart, from each other and their homes. Or, better yet, the growl of an angry cat. ‘You go into a band with four friends and then something gets wedged in there like money and you see people you thought you know change. Trust is not something that comes easily to me.’

She sings, ‘Just trust in my God.’ One toke over the line. One toke over the line.

Then it hits me. I’m with someone famous. ‘After I left (Pause. Behold the sour face!) I didn’t think anyone would care about me but they want to talk about it, which I still don’t get.’ Get it. Get it. It all has to be got, like theology for the masses. People worship. It’s fucking human nature, man. So, knowing that, what is your advice? ‘I am not good at giving advice. Just live your life and if someone gets in your way, fuck ‘em.’

Out here amongst the rubble of a demolished city we’ve somehow stumbled, albeit somewhat haphazardly, upon the answer to all our questions. Fuck ‘em. You can take a trip, you can transplant yourself, but in the end you are right back at the exact place you’ve been envisioning of going all along. Bowman has found a home in District Six due in part to the demise of the fallen city and its forgotten citizens. But their loss and failure is ours too. And what Bowman has created with her new District Six is the central illusion, the desperate assumption, that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel.
 
More: Amphibious Assault
Afraid of Plants: Jeff Warren