Paul Riekert sheds some light on the early Battery 9 track.
His face suddenly changed. There was a manic, intense look in his eyes. His knuckles turned white.
“Oooom Kooosie…”, he growled into the mic, distorting every part of the circuit.
Berea, Johannesburg, 1993. At Nel (Somerfaan) came to visit, and we were having some serious fun with my newly acquired sampler. An Ensoniq ASR-10, to be precise. I had asked At if he wanted to “do a sample” – whatever he liked. I handed him the mic, hit record, and this is what he did! We laughed our asses off.
(This affinity for audio absurdity was par for the course. It felt completely natural and comfortable. Apart from all things industrial, we had also been listening to Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Bongwater, Fishbone, and so on.)
I kept the sample on ice, waiting for the right moment to use it. About a year later I added it to a track I was working on, and it sounded great – intense and menacing, but funny. I wrote some lyrics, exploring the idea of a secret police force – the Music Police. If you were found to be in possession of crappy corporate pop music, they would drag you outside and execute you on the spot. Oom Kosie was one of their most efficient and completely merciless enforcers. Like the character Baasspeurder Faber, he would say “Genugtig!” upon discovering the contraband. Hearing “Genugtig!” was like a death sentence for the unlucky pop music fan.
In the meantime, I had met Nick Patterton (RIP), a severely intelligent, well-connected and completely insane person. He would later set up and engineer the vocal recordings and mastering for Protskrog, the first Battery 9 album. Nick loved the idea of Oom Kosie and sent me a sketch he (Nick, of course) had done of him, the one above.
I later decided to can the lyrics – just keeping “Genugtig!”, leaving it nice and open.