Battery 9

Battery 9 (pronounced, in Afrikaans, as Butteray Nea-ge), an industrial music project from Johannesburg, South Africa, is the brainchild of Paul Riekert, who writes, plays and records the music in a mixture of English and Afrikaans. The band name is sometimes written, without a space, as Battery9.

Riekert started recording under the name Battery 9 in 1994, bored with the creative constraints of a standard rock band format. A platform to run various projects from, One F Music, was subsequently founded, in the form of an independent record label and a small home studio.

The first Battery 9 album, Protskrog, was released in 1995. Made and backed by little more than a shoestring budget, it sold well enough to warrant a licensing deal with independent record company Tic Tic Bang.

The next release, Strop (1996), saw Battery 9 break through to a wider audience, with the song "Kiss the Machine" receiving daytime airplay and eventually charting on 5FM, a major nationwide commercial radio station. For the first time, the major industry took notice and the project received major media coverage, while the live act played for increasingly bigger audiences, culminating in a solo show at the Viper Room in Pretoria in 1997 that drew 1200 people. In the same year, the album Gris, featuring remixes, re-interpretations and interactive CD-ROM data, was released.

Wrok was released in 1998 and was awarded Best Rock Album in that year's South African Music Awards.

After a few major live performances, including supporting The Prodigy and Faithless on their tour in South Africa, Battery 9 took a break for a couple of months to re-assemble the live act. In December 2000 and January 2001, Battery 9, with the newly formed live act, performed a well received short tour of South Africa. The set included new songs from the album Sondebok which was released in 2002.

After a long break, a sixth album, Straks, was released in late 2005 with almost no marketing or promotion.

The next album, Galbraak, is expected during the second semester of 2008.

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