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MAAK HEK TOE !!!
SOUND DESIGN and MUSIC
The four main social worlds of the story are circumscribed by their own complementary, and at times intersecting, sonic worlds… in both diegetic and non-diegetic forms (the latter not heard by the characters, of course).
The Nature Farm and Biker’s Heaven, both import their ‘sound’. The latter is usually a driving, aggressive sound: growling rock underscored by barking dogs and motorcycle engines echoing between the hills. The Nature Farm, by contrast, sets globally-appropriated faux-spiritual sounds, like pan pipes and didgeridoos, against a diegetic mix of wind chimes, bubbling brooks, and whispering grasses.
Miems’ farm, Vreemdeling, has a more direct connection to the world of the workers and their families. Whether the polka or the langarm, Afrikaans folk forms have similar roots to the rhythms of ‘Cape’ music – as, begrudgingly, do the people themselves.
In Sounding The Cape, Denis-Constant Martin (2013) charts the emergence of Cape music as mapping the development of creolised identities out of the meeting of indigenous peoples with an assortment of colonising cultures from the east, the west, and the north. That creolisation then becoming, in itself, a conscious process of identity formation and assertion, right up to the recent years of struggle against apartheid. What David Kramer refers to as roots Afrikaans music is, for the purposes of this film therefore, a unique and resonant form that is engagingly critical of complacency and manufactured ambience. As Kramer himself sings: Almal is op soek na die ou Karoo; as jy daai wil sien kyk hier in my oë.
The primary role of the workers in MAAK HEK TOE!!! is to guide the perspective of the viewer. Not without irony, language could become a barrier. But, in moderation and subtly interpreted, this issue then amplifies an underlying message. An empathetic understanding conveyed largely through music can conjure a simpler form of knowing, befitting the style and genre of the film. Sprinkled through the worker community will be musicians and the makings of a band, and a tendency to laugh and sing and dance at life.