Much consideration has been given to the backstory of John Wizards – the story of how bedroom programmer John Withers (see what happens when you take the cloak off!) bumped into Rwandan refugee Emmanuel Nzaramba in Cape Town and the pair began making music together, producing a record that justifies the word "magical". Commentators especially picked up on the idea that a coupling of this kind – ebony and ivory, living in perfect harmony, as someone else once sang – is still improbable in post-apartheid South Africa, even if Withers has said: "I'd be cautious to ever think of ourselves as a progressive band representing any sort of social change".
Instead, John Wizards is an album that floats through time, eluding concrete meaning. Gentle synth and piano lines start to squiggle and squelch, rhythms become skittish and then collapses into a lull and Nzaramba's voice shimmers through the haze; for the most part, there aren't really what you'd call songs, rather an assembly of melodies and ideas that coalesce for a short period before heading off to enjoy different vistas.
It's the mood of the record that initially captivates: it is otherworldly but uplifting as much as unsettling. It's intriguing that Withers has made his living writing advertising jingles, putting him somewhere in the pages of a pub pop quiz alongside Barry Manilow (whose credits in his early career include songs for Stridex acne fighting products) and Justin Hawkins of the Darkness (everyone from Ikea to Irn Bru). It's as if he's shed all that karma, producing a record something that sounds almost charming in its innocence, complete with the odd element of kitsch. At some level, it even reminded me at times of Smile-era Beach Boys, and it does feel very much the product of a singular vision, or perhaps hallucination.
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In fact, it's not an album that particularly invites being played live. I saw John Wizards at the Jazz Cafe in London in early November, and perhaps it was an off night, but the band – filled out by a schoolfriend of Withers and three others – struggled to replicate the fragile charm of the recorded work, leaving headliners the Owiny Sigoma Band (makers of another of my favourite albums of the year; check out Power Punch) to steal the show.
The amalgam of John Wizard's likely influences might stretch to that modern palimpsest of a sunny West Coast sensibility, Brooklyn chillwave, but Withers has inevitably soaked up sounds closer to home: the Afro-pop of Brenda Fassie as well as contemporary South African house. That is, in the age of the digital bit, when so much other music sounds as if it could have been produced anywhere, there's a distinctly local flavour to this record, but rather than make an argument for John Wizards representing something special about contemporary South Africa, it's probably more interesting to contemplate their place in the world in terms of globalisation or even theories of mondialité. The problem is that listening to them is only likely to encourage a spot of daydreaming.