Spencer Clark’s Typhonian Highlife Gives Credo Mutwa’s Stories a Soundtrack

The music on Sumerian Star Creatures was not written for a record. Typhonian Highlife first performed it in 2017, as part of Imagineers in the Underworld, the film series Spencer Clark made with Xavier Garcia Bardon. Working with Corum, Clark built short pieces that functioned as segues between filmed segments of Credo Mutwa telling stories.

Mutwa is the reason the material holds together. A sangoma, sculptor, muralist and writer, and a former National Laureate of South Africa, he spent years documenting Zulu folk history before folding reports of extraterrestrial contact into it, including his accounts of the Chitauri. In the film, he appears surrounded by his own sculptures, narrating those encounters. When a story ended, the screen went blank and the musicians played.

That structure explains the album’s character. These are not songs about Mutwa so much as pieces built to sit beside him, and the music keeps the shape of that function even without the images in front of it.

Clark frames his work through Kenneth Grant’s idea of the mauve zone, a place outside time reached through outer gateways, which is a fair description of his method. He records under many names, each a separate line of inquiry, and the output has not slowed since 2004, when he and James Ferraro formed the Skaters. What stays constant is the approach: find a body of belief, take it at its word, and let the music answer.