Xnau Xnau Improvising

Xnau Xnau Improvising comprises the musician duo Garth Erasmus and Esther Marie Pauw who first began working together in 2015. Their duo name refers to aspects of rejuvenation and healing that come from initiation, or 'xnau' (pronounced now), into cross-over music practices of care. Garth builds his instruments with Khoi memory as inspiration towards creativity and activism. He holds a Visual Arts diploma graduate from Rhodes University (South Africa) and is also a practicing visual artist and founding chairperson of Africa South Art Initiative (asai.co.za). Esther Marie Pauw is a classically trained flutist who was increasingly initiated into improvising in working with Garth. Some of their performances have been documented on films by Aryan Kaganof of African Noise Foundation (on vimeo), including 'Khoisan Ghost Kreun' (2016), 'Kreun' (2016), 'Nege fragmente uit ses Khoi'npsalms' (2018), 'Suiwer in Blauw' (2018), 'Smeekbede' (2020) and 'Invocation' (2020). Their music can be heard on Greg de Cuir's online exhibit, https://mediacityfilmfestival.com/dark-dark-gallery/ (Act IV). The same set of 24 sound pieces was hosted at MOCAA Zeitz Museum in Cape Town in 2020-2021. A joint artist residency at Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS) in 2020 saw the creation of improvisation sets, including a new recording of Paul Hanmer's 'ma... wanne kommie druiwe' (written for them in memory of evictions from Roesdorp in Stellenbosch, 1971), the 'Speech Ear Trumpet' set, the 'Overdub' set, as well as an extract from a live concert available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjLbppR19Kc. Garth and Esther Marie are artist affiliates of the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation (aoinstitute.ac.za) at Stellenbosch University where they also founded the Africa Open Improvising collective in 2020. Here players meet in person, but also online, to improvise as can be heard at https://soundcloud.com/user-610733588. They have co-written articles in cultural online journals such as Ellipses, Herri and OAR platform. Esther Marie's PhD in artistic research (Stellenbosch University) focused on decolonial methods of curating classical concert spaces in connection to geo-politics of land, space and migration of practices.