Cities and Memory - remixing the world

I saw this recording before I heard it. At the Pitt Rivers Museum at the start of the project. The physical object: an original Edison wax phonograph cylinder from 1914. I was struck by how modern it seemed in some ways; the corporate branding on the label. I imagined it being purchased from a shop. 

Then I saw it was a recording made in Nagaland and I thought of my friend, Temsu, an artist from Nagaland. I thought of Nagaland: such a fascinating place, so rich in tradition and culture; megaliths, hills and jungle. Then I heard the recording, the voices singing rhythmically, a work song designed to make the hours pass and how the hours have passed – into years, decades, a century. I wondered about those people and how little I will ever know of their lives. And the voice that introduces the recording too, an anthropologist now just as lost to time as the singing Nagas, his world on the brink of being consumed by an industrial warfare that within a generation would reach Nagaland too in one of the biggest, most significant battles of the second war, now largely forgotten here. 

I thought of Vaughn-Williams and of Butterworth (he himself lost in that first war), I thought of their reinvention of folk music at that time and all of the periodic rediscoveries of folk music since. This led me to a work song melody with its purpose lost, morphed into a hypnotic repetition. The richness of individual lives melted down and boiled by time; all of it forever lost, only dust and ghosts scratched into wax. 

"Ishi no ghi sholu": agricultural work song reimagined by Jon Griffin.
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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

This has been the most difficult piece I have ever written for Cities and Memory. What could I add to a recording made by Patti Langton of a young Moru man - Timon Beri? The recording was of Timon singing and playing a lamellophone. Whatever I ever I did, it felt like cheap exploitation. The recording was beautiful, authentic and real.

In my research I came across a paper by Patti Langton called Personal Reflections on Fieldwork: A Moral Dilemma and it resonated and hit hard with how I was feeling about what I was creating with this field recording.

In the end, with the deadline fast approaching I separated Timon’s voice from the lamellophone and decided to use his voice as a sort of tribute to him, even though it was heavily processed. As I was scouring for further inspiration, I found a vocal sample which says "we dance, we dream, we love" and this became the title of the track as well as being the light in the piece.

Up to then it had been a brooding dark piece of dark electronica which I felt represented not only my frustration but also the backdrop of war and famine which was and still is so prevalent in Sudan. After all, what can a piece of music be against the backdrop of so much human tragedy, but I felt the lyric spoke of the human experience that everybody, from whatever culture, race or creed can identify with. We all dance, we dream, we love.

Sanza (lamellophone) music reimagined by Rob Knight. 

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Zande songs, dances and spoken language made by social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930.

Recorded by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

"Ishi no ghi sholu": an agricultural work song performed by a group of Sümi Naga male singers.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Naga (Angami, Sümi, Lotha, Chang and Sangtam) songs made by administrator and anthropologist John Hutton in India between 1915 and 1919.

Recorded by John Henry Hutton.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Sanza (lamellophone) music performed by young Moru man Timon Beri.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of cassette tape recordings of music and spoken language (principally Laarim) made by anthropologist Patti Langton in South Sudan during 1979 and 1980.

Recorded by Patti Langton.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

The Land is Our Mother is based on a collection of field recordings of digeridoos made for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies from the archive of the Pitts River Museum. Information about the recordings is limited but they were originally recorded on reel to reel tape.

The recordings are rich and varied, some including song, but I eventually had to choose some of my favourites to build the piece. I was particularly interested in using the rhythms as these are such a key aspect in the power of digeridoo playing.

The piece is called the Land is Our Mother in reference to the feelings of Indigenous People towards the land, its evolution and their rights to live in the land. Indigenous People have lived in Australia for at least 60,000 years and have a deep respect and spiritual connection to the land which is often expressed through digeridoo playing.

“The land is our mother. Like a human mother, the land gives us protection, enjoyment and provides out needs economic, social and religious.” (Djinyini Gondarra, Aboriginal Elder)

Didgeridoo music reimagined by Laura Hills.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

I chose this recording - an orchestral Korean recording from Seoul, 1972 - after initially earmarking another sound, but this one spoke to me with its uplifting, playful and mischievous spirit & felt right. Atmospherically, it evoked a busy market place or a ceremonial dance, putting me in mind of the benevolent chaos of the ‘hungry ghost’ concept - more of which later.

The instruments featured in the recording are: traditional Korean percussion - probably a Janggu - and two double-reeded wind instruments : the Hojok and the Hyang P’iri, both similar in tone to an oboe and known for their loud and powerful sound.

After several listens through, I honed in on particular phrases that I liked - ones I might start building a new sound world around. My approach is to improvise with electronics and various instrumentation, until I generate clusters of "sympathetic" musical ideas that complement the source recording and suggest further layers. I view this as a collaboration - a conversation between me and the recordings.

One of the first things I noticed was the challenge of finding accompaniment that felt in tune, because the original recording is not in standard Western tuning - as you would imagine. My years of playing South East Asian Gamelan and love of tuned percussion, would help me to embrace the piece's wonderfully "wonky" quality.

The recordings were really inspiring to work with, generating lots of material which needed to be focussed. My initial piece reached an impasse, so I started a second piece which became the piece you will hear - along with some incorporated moments from the first piece. I became concerned that the work was becoming “too much about me” - maybe the recording’s were getting lost a bit - so I used the trick of using some film footage of Korean life in the 70s, and importing it into Logic for me to watch whilst composing - a way of keeping me in tune with the original essence of the time, location and character of the recording.

I also wanted to incorporate the sound of the Korean language somehow and in the process of developing the piece I’d started to feel like I was "dancing with ghosts": the ones inhabiting the recordings, but also my own recently departed loved ones. So not surprisingly, the piece became an homage to ancestral spirits.

It all fell into place when I introduced the Korean phrases "ghost dance" and "dancing with ghosts", and settled on the title "How I learnt to live with ghosts". This seemed a fitting double meaning to me, after deeply engaging with this haunting sound recording, I felt I’d danced and collaborated with a moment in the past, from a different culture and time, always conscious of honouring and respecting the origins of the sound and its social and cultural history. I hope that my sonic storytelling has succeeded in that intention, mixing together the personal and the source material into a compelling listen.

Instrumentals featuring the hyang piri and hojok reimagined by Tim Saul.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

The sound that I was allocated for this track was described as a Zande drinking song, from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Zande songs, dances and spoken language made by social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930. 

I spent some time thinking about the collection of songs that was taking place across the world from the end of the 19th Century right up to that time, and wondered what kind of 'drinking song' might have been collected right here, where I am in the North York Moors National Park. I listened to lots of source recordings of English drinking songs from the EFDSS Full English digital archive, but I was drawn back to the Mummers play that we perform in Whitby every year, and the character of the Doctor, who has a little bottle in his inside-outside-jacket-pocket. 

It's a little Nip Nap, and it's most effective if you let it run down your tip tap. It will cure all ills, and do you good. When I was listening to the recording, I was struck by the rhythmic drive of the cylinder, inserting itself into the song, unbidden. That set the tempo, and the composition came into being. 

Drinking songs are sung the world over. We have more in common that could ever set us apart. For me, the union of cultures through music is a shoot of hope in a world of division. Something to raise a glass to at the very least!

Zande drinking song reimagined by Rebecca Denniff.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

 "Didgeridoo music": collection of didgeridoo recordings prepared by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (now the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies), with commentary.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a number of miscellaneous or individual ethnographic field recordings (rediscovered during a recent research project).

Recorded by Alexander Cornelis van der Leeden and John Robert Cleverly.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Korea: three instrumental pieces of music, featuring the hyang piri (double-reed wind instrument or oboe) and hojok (double-reed wind instrument, also known as taepyeongso), recorded at the Institute for National Classical Music in Seoul.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a small number of recordings issued or released by foreign broadcasting corporations or radio associations.

Recorded by Laurence Rowland and Ernest Picken.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds