The Pan African Space Station

Now in its second year, PASS continues its cross-cultural and cyber-spatial exploration

The Pan African Space Station (PASS) is an annual 30-day music intervention on the internet and in venues across greater Cape Town from September 12 to October 12.

PASS radio, a unique freeform music radio station, is back with 30 days of cutting edge music streamed live via the internet. The station features guest DJs, themed shows, live performances and readings, tributes, debates, sound art, speeches, interviews and much, much more.

Highlights on this year’s broadcast programme include Songs for Biko, a 24-hour praise party for Steve Biko on 12 Sept (Biko Day) and Songs for Bheki, a musical tribute to the late South African philosopher and musician Bheki Mseleku, which closes the live music component on October 4.

Visit www.panafricanspacestation.org.za to view last year's programming and listen to archived "PASS Casts" including radio mixes, talks and performances by acts at last year's festival.

Between October 1 – 4 2009, PASS II plays host to genre-busting music outfits from global Africa dedicated to exploring new musical territory.

The festival also features a series of new collaborations between South African musicians. Multi-talented jazz vocalist and trombone player Siya Makuzeni adds adventurous sonic textures to world-renowned drummer and percussionist Barry van Zyl's southern African sound-rhythm stew, Boboti.

Elsewhere, politically engaged, slamming poetic jazz upstarts Udaba are joined by Hymphatic Thabz, a Joburg MC know for his forward-thinking beats and welded-to-the-rhythm lyrical flow.

In addition, the festival will includes a collaborative, experimental chorale work based on the novella War Chorale by pioneering Chilean academic, visionary, writer and revolutionary Fernando Alegría, with composition by Bheki Khoza.

The live music component PASS again takes place in a series of different venues across greater Cape Town, engaging diverse together audiences and provoking new forms of creative expression and social mobilization that that foregrounding history and memory as well as agency and difference.

Audiences will travel from St Georges Cathedral, Michaelis/UCT and the Slave Church in the city centre to Guga S'thebe in Langa and All Nations Club in Salt River.

PASS is an initiative of the Africa Centre in partnership with Heliocentrics (Ntone Edjabe and Neo Muyanga).

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