Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"Kukimi Lakuhu 'Le" (Song of the Kuki War): polyphonic song about Sümi Naga interpreter Kekheche, who was involved in the Anglo-Kuki War of 1917–19, performed by a group of Sümi Naga singers ("Kekheche, my father,/ Kekheche, my father").

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

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 Anne Elizabeth Pennington.

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

This recomposition begins from a deep interest and curiosity towards the material life of the archival recording itself. The source comes from the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: wax cylinder recordings of Naga (Angami, Sümi, Lotha, Chang, and Sangtam) songs recorded between 1915 and 1919 by administrator and anthropologist John Hutton. Rather than treating the recording of a polyphonic song as a transparent document of the past, I approached it as a dense and opaque sonic field — one in which voice, noise, damage, and time are inseparably entangled.

My primary impulse was to draw sound from within the crackles itself. The surface noise of the wax cylinder — its dense abrasions, hiss, fizz, and granular distortions — became a site of listening rather than an obstruction to clarity. Using filtering, time-stretching, modulation, reverberation, and layering, I created a series of tracks foregrounding the submerged voices and textures, amplifying tonalities already present within the recording rather than introducing external material. The duration of the piece remains close to the original, but the sound is folded back onto itself, allowing latent frequencies and resonances to emerge from the polyphonies. The recordings being done in colonial contexts.

Conceptually, the work is informed by Mark Fisher’s essay on the metaphysics of the crackle, and the persistence of the past as sonic residue, as well as Halim El-Dabh’s pioneering experiments with wire recording and mystique concrete. El-Dabh’s Wire Recorder piece in which he searches for an “inner sound” within the field recordings of the zaar ceremony offered a crucial precedent: the idea that recording technologies can open audio not just to preservation, but to transformation and speculative listening.

The opacity of the recording is crucial to the work. Its moments of unintelligibility are not simply technical blockages but reminders of a colonial listening context or as Dylan Robinson frames it in settler colonial contexts as “hungry listening” in which certain meanings, affects, and knowledges may never have been available — or intended to be available — to the colonial ear. What resists comprehension here becomes a form of sonic refusal, insisting on limits to extraction, transcription, and understanding.

The composition thus becomes less a restoration than a re-listening — an attempt to stay with the archive’s fractures, and to hear how voice, history, and material decay co-produce one another across time.

"Kukimi Lakuhu 'Le" (Song of the Kuki War) reimagined by bloop.

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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

Laarim warrior singing to his favourite bull ("This bull is the whole of my love/ I will never say anything against it").

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 warrior sings gently and lovingly to his favourite bull. As he repeats his song, we're drawn into the beautiful moment and as the communication continues, voices weave in and out with the past and present. 

A reminder of the musical connection between humans with each other and other animals on the planet.

Laarim warrior singing to his favourite bull reimagined by Lostworldsounds.

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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

Nuristani music: recording of traditional Nuristani songs, featuring the waj (five-stringed harp) and sarangi (two-stringed fiddle), with vocal accompaniment, recorded in Afghanistan by anthropologist Lennart Edelberg.

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 Lennart Edelberg.

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

With a project like this, I knew the work had to begin with research. I immersed myself in the cultural textures of South Sudan: its music, its landscapes, its people. From photographs and descriptions, a sense of place started to form. I wanted the first section of the piece to feel intimate yet quietly observant. 

I found myself picturing the Laarim man and his beloved bull, Logralim, moving together across the land, carrying out the rhythms of an ordinary day. From that image, the music slowly surfaced. I knew the original field recording needed to remain whole, a living thread, so I kept it centred in the mix. 

The second part of the piece reached outward, toward the stars. I imagined him looking up at the constellation Taurus, the stars echoing something ancient and vast. Those visualisations, both earthly and celestial, became the internal score from which this composition unfolded.

"Chuluth": a song for a favourite bull reimagined by Eulipion Corps.

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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

"Chuluth": a Laarim man's song for a favourite bull ("I love cattle without horns/ This bull is called Logralim").

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

A significant aspect of this project has been research into the location of the recording - the Colombian Chocó department, one of the rainiest regions on Earth. With dense rainforest and flooding, the terrain is uncompromising and one of the most isolated regions of Colombia, with no major infrastructure due to underdeveloped roads, yet it is one of the most richly biodiverse zones on the planet.

Since the recording was made, there has been ongoing desecration of the land from both violent conflict and extraction of its gold leading to enforced displacement, cultural disruption, poverty and lack of healthcare and resources. The more I learnt about this volatile status in Chocó in relation to both its natural and violent political climate, the more I felt a responsibility to understand the impact on the Indigenous communities such as the Emberá, as well as the historical roots of the AfroColombian diaspora. 

The dense and remote jungles have historically provided refuge for African slaves escaping from gold mines and plantations. This dichotomy of the land as both a place of refuge and isolation inhospitable to settlement offered dynamic scope for where this could be taken as a sonic journey of nature and its wilderness doing what it does. This called to mind the concept of the genius loci, Latin for the spirit of a place and the indigenous belief in Animism, the living soul of natural phenomena.

My reading around this subject led me to how the elders and shamans of the region are dedicated to the preservation of their ancestral cultural heritage and traditions. Natural forces such as rain are associated with energies called “Jai” and a Jaibaná (shaman) is the intermediary who interacts with these energies to restore balance in the natural world. 
 
The intensity of the rain in the recording evokes a sense of the water element unequivocally dominating the land. 
I wanted to remain sympathetic to this and imagine the nuances within the interaction of this force of nature with the land itself and to consider what we may hear if we were inside the underworld of the forest, beneath the canopy of trees. 

We were inspired to consider the torrential rain and wind interacting with an imaginary Jaibaná who summons a call and response to the forest catalysing a sequence of entrainment with the drum and the heartbeat of the forest, as if a natural electrical current has been ignited. 

The final composition contains both analogue and digital methods. Live recordings of gong, rattles, singing bowls, hand drum, vocal overtoning and other sound effects such as insects and wing sounds created with paper. In shamanic tradition, the shaman's drum is described as being the horse that journey on, so I had this in mind with the drumming as a gateway into this communication with the elements. 

Granular sampler 
Modular synths 
Reaktor/ Steam Pipe 
Bastl Leploop 
Microgranny 2
Main software / Ableton Live 
Panning and filtering in mixing process to create 3D immersion. 

This piece was created in honour of the land and its Indigenous population and to Jonathan Ambache & Richard Saunarez Smith for their contribution to ethnographic sound history. 
María Christofi (The Sound Apothecary) composition and analogue instruments/voice. Jules Dickens (Abstract Source Music) digital sequences and mastering. 

Torrential rain in Colombia reimagined by The Sound Apothecary and Abstract Source.

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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

Storm: recording of torrential rain made during fieldwork in Colombia.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of Chocó music and soundscapes made by students Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith in Colombia in 1965.

Recorded by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith.

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