Dye Hard Intervew: Ramuntcho Matta: Expanding human capacity

Credit: Oona Matta

Ramunchto Matta is a French composer and interdisciplinary artist. He has worked with people such as Don Cherry, Brion Gysin, John Cage, Chris Marker,  and Robert Wilson. He has released 34 solo CDs and collaborated on about 20 other albums. He has exhibited his visual work in Paris, New York, London, Madrid, Barcelona, Tokyo, and Rome.

A book titled Hello Yes Hello: 30 Dialogues, containing conversations between Kathelin Gray and Ramuntcho Matta about Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, was published by Moloko Plus in 2025, and Ce que Brion m'a dit de Gysin (Marcel le Poney) in 2026.

Your father was the Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, who knew writers and artists such as Andre Breton, Joyce Mansour, Max Ernst, and Robert Motherwell. I imagine your childhood must have been interesting, with many famous artists around you. What was it like?

Everything was normal.

It was “normal” to sleep in a closet with holes in the door to be able to breathe...Read more.

A Dye Hard Interview: Lee Beckworth: Poetry should be a way of avoiding commodification and superficiality

Lee Beckworth aka Lee Kwo was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1952/He started writing at 17 and completed a Degree at Deakin University in creative writing and Journalism in 1974/After travels in Europe he moved to Melbourne and completed a Bachelor of Letters in literature and psychology at Melbourne University/ He has published five works of fiction and two books of poetry/ His interests in music and photography have been expressed through the band Kicks and an exhibition of collages and photography in 2016/

You are an artist, a writer and musician, but which medium do you consider the most important, or do they each carry the same weight?

Well for me they all contribute to each other and each has a period of time where my lifestyle is dominated by one or other of them respectively/I have made performance videos using original music and photo images and I have used art works as covers  for published books and collages/I wrote lyrics for bands I was playing with and usually remained active in all creative areas including sculpture and photography ...Read more

Rachel Zadok reading Off-ramp

Cape Town writer Rachel Zadok posted this self-portrait on Twitter, and described Off-ramp as "an artwork by Jo'burg's literary Max Ernst, Gary Cummiskey".