Fusing poetry, world music, electro-acoustic soundscapes and jazz, Souls of Ancient Fish offers a mystical journey that’s hypnotic, haunting and sublime. A collaboration between the poet Ruben Mowszowski, traditional music artist and cultural historian Dizu Plaatjies and soprano saxophonist and electronic musician Maxim Starcke, it forms a lush current, a confluence of leaping vocabularies that celebrate the fluid and rich possibilities of words and sounds. Tempered by love and loss and infused with the musicality of the oral tradition and ritual, the group’s incantations are a poetic and spiritual atlas of new imaginative territories. – Mail & Guardian

Hieroglyphs (sacred writing) is a exploration of the male/female archetype in a sequence of short focussed pieces composed by Maxim and Ruben (Australia) The first pieces premiered at the recent AMPAC film festival in Pretoria. They have been called luminous, weightless, mysterious and with a breathlessness that takes you back to the beginning of things. They will be performed together with a selection from the Souls of Ancient Fish program Incantations.

SOULS OF ANCIENT FISH is a collaboration between the founder poet Ruben Mowszowski, traditional music artist and cultural historian Dizu Plaatjies and soprano saxophonist and electronic musician Maxim Starcke. The group’s haunting music combines poetry, world music, soundscape and jazz in a syncretic mix which draws the listener into a shared journey into the imagination.The first performance by Souls of Ancient Fish was in 2012 at The Forge in Kalk Bay.