Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Excerpts from expedition tapes: recording of songs and the playing of musical instruments in the northern part of the Oriente of Ecuador made by members of the Oxford University Expedition to Ecuador in 1960.

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 Michael R. Emerson and Ralph Hudson Johnson.

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 recording I started with came with a description, which included the following phrase: "youths [...] drum on trees as they pass through the forest, sometimes spirits may drum the tree during boyobé ceremonies."

I was keen to both explore the rhythms and that sense of being joined by spirits - the ambiguity about who plays; as much in the lack of information about the actual individuals as in a spiritual way.

A photograph of these "youths" by one of the trees became a guiding image as I stretched sounds, resampled, chopped and rearranged, all the while trying to find the spirit both of and beyond the rhythm. Eventually these original and new patterns, skipping and jolting through an imaginary forest - meeting, somehow, across time - coalesced into this piece of music.

Gooma (tree drum) played with sticks reimagined by de Velden.

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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 horn sounds like this" originates from a December 1966 reel tape recording featuring musicologist Jeremy Montague demonstrating various horns. The 30-minute document represents a specific moment in museological practice: a scholarly voice explaining before sounding, contextualising before experiencing.

Rather than preserving the integrity of this material, Francesco Ganassin and Sergio Marchesini chose the path of creative betrayal. Montague's voice and the demonstrated horn sounds are subjected to a process of corruption that reveals hidden dimensions while obscuring others. The horn demonstrations bleed into one another, traveling through layers of digital memory that fail and distort. The narration fragments and becomes repetition and then texture. 

"The horn sounds like this" lives through sonic paradoxes. It is elementary as the sound production techniques of the horns themselves, urban as the background noise of a nocturnal city, minimal as a badly-tuned radio transmission, truculent as a piece heard halfway through by two musicians coming home from a concert on a humid night, when exhaustion opens unexpected spaces of sound. The result is a conscious aberration, a dirty listening that glorifies, by betraying, the sound of a horn traveling through time to a broken device of the future.

The document's processing is realized through DzigaLoop, a one-of-a-kind digital device built on Bela board, conceived in 2020 and custom developed for this project. DzigaLoop here functions as a tape looper that contaminates and destabilises sounds, creating a dialogue between two generations of tape-based practices: the archival recording and contemporary digital looping with its inherent aleatory processes.

Trumpets and horns reimagined by Francesco Ganassin and Sergio Marchesini.

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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

"Trumpets and horns": narration by musicologist Jeremy Montague about the contents of the trumpets display in the Pitt Rivers Museum, with examples of instruments being played.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a small number of recordings of the musical instruments in the institution's collections being played or discussed

Unknown recordist.

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 is about feeling that you don’t know enough to handle something properly. It’s built from samples of the opening horn blast, but what really interested me was the surrounding story: a group of explorers and botanists’ attempt to climb the active, glaciated volcano Antisana; they surveyed the forests up to the snowline, and the northern and western ice tongues, but were cut short when the snow bridge ahead collapsed and made the route impassable. 

I was particularly taken with a cut-off confession, an admission of some mistake almost but not quite captured on tape. It was most likely some small nothing, but it suggested the content of the song.

Excerpts from expedition tapes reimagined by Earthly Years.

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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 moment that I first heard this sound, I thought the flute sounded very much like a little steam train. At first, I researched about Columbian trains and found there is a tourist train to the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá, an underground Roman Catholic church built within the tunnels of a salt mine, 200 metres (660 ft) underground in a halite mountain near the city of Zipaquirá, in Cundinamarca, Colombia.

I wanted the listener to hear the original recording in the track but did edit the order, tempo and pitch to give an idea of the effort of the train on its journey. I then added a rhythmic synth line to give a feeling of travel and sourced some steam train sounds from freesound. Towards the end of the track I layered other synth lines and a church organ as the train reaches its destination, the salt cathedral. 

However, the more I worked on the track, It brought back memories of a journey I made many years ago on the little train that takes people up Yr Wyddfa. So a little nod to this is the tune to Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau that comes in at the end of the track.

Many of the tracks and audio pieces I create are based on memories and this is no exception. From the moment that I first heard this sound, I thought it sounded very much like a little steam train chugging up a very steep mountainside, whether in South America or my homeland, Wales.

Chocó panpipe music reimagined by Museleon.

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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 piece for the Century of Sound project began with a single field recording drawn from the archive of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Rather than this recurring functioning as an objective document of place or event, I approached the recording as a temporal fracture, a sound that had already been severed from the moment that produced it. I was inspired by the thought that a recording is made not to preserve presence, but to register our disappearance and that an archive does not store the past intact, it stores its decaying remains. 

Thus all recorded sound is hauntological, and exists as an audible ghost or spectral presence of something or someone, the reanimation of the past as a memory becoming a new memory and so on, each time changing its perception. The record I used carried voices and environmental details (mostly of work activities) that no longer exist, yet through the recording can never fully vanish, as sound has folded time back on itself.

The entire composition is derived from this single archival recording, utilising a range of techniques and methods serving to evoke the idea of decay and ephemerality. My influences were from Basinski’s Disintegration Loops, early Fripp and Eno tape looping (Frippertronics), and ambience and texture processing such as that used by Burial, all of which led to an approach to the recording where erosion and degradation was treated as source material. 

The conversational voices and percussive hammering elements, were fragmented and reassembled to drift in and out of intelligibility. suggestive of memory replayed imperfectly, half-heard and misremembered. Here noise reduction processes from Izotope RX were used against their intended purpose, rather than cleaning the recording, they are used to reveal what remains when inverted, for example the removed reverb, or the removed spectral artefacts, recording scars, and otherworldly sonic residues. Also analogue processes were central to the compositional methodology, where the recordings and echoes were run through delay pedals and recorded on to cassette, the composition was then rerecorded using worldising (playing sounds in to a space and rerecording them) as a method. Through the repeated rerecording, tape saturation, wow and flutter, and worldising techniques, distance and materiality became embedded into the composition.

As such, the composition does not progress linearly, but I hope that voices and sounds return altered, degraded, unresolved, yet seeming forming a newer narrative where the listener is evoked into considering their own sound world and memory. I am trying to evoke a past which is neither accessible nor gone, but caught in a loop, yet re-embedded in the present. In this sense, the work reflects a hauntological impasse, where the archive continues to speak, even as it itself continues to disintegrate.

Laarim elder recounts the history of his people reimagined by Neil Spencer Bruce.

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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

Loprimoi, a Laarim elder, recounts the history of his people, with the sound of blacksmiths working, hammering metal, nearby.

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

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

I spend a lot of time thinking about a project before I even begin to work. I wanted to create something that would feel odd and a bit disorienting to the listener. I got started and spent weeks reinterpreting the percussive music of the earth bow, a single-stringed musical instrument. Some ideas morphed from one place to another but then I got lost. So, I stopped and started again from scratch. This is where I ended up. I think it's pretty good.

I read a great deal about Louis Sarno and his love of the hypnotic music of the Bayaka people. His love had him uproot his life to live and work with them in the Central African Republic until his death in 2017. "Lost in this World" is dedicated to them.

Ngbanda playing the ngbindi (earth bow) reimagined by Bill McKenna.

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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