Cities And Memory

When I first heard this recording of men gathered around a guitar, singing fragments of traditional songs and inventing lyrics on the spot, with women and children laughing in the background - it hit me: music isn’t just sound, it’s connection. It's a reminder of the timeless beauty in coming together, sharing stories, passing down traditions, and creating something meaningful in the moment.Curious about what the singers were saying, I reached out to people from Central Africa, and the response was surprising - those improvised lyrics were built from single words in regional slang. In this kind of music-making, it often starts with one word, then another, and before you know it, a whole verse is born. It’s spontaneous, alive, and beautifully organic.For my remix, I used the main melody of the original field recording as the foundation, blending in those improvised words as fillers. I also incorporated the traditional rhythm of Soukous - a guitar-driven genre from Congo, often referred to as Congolese rumba,

This piece is built around a field recording from the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum of Berber beggars singing for charity.Listening to this recording, across time, what struck me was not difference but familiarity. Themes of begging, homelessness and poverty recur in traditional songs from all cultures, spanning the centuries. Despite differences in place, language and technology, poverty, hunger, social injustice, and the vulnerability that comes with these things, remains constant.Through my organisation in Whitby, Flash Company Arts, I frequently work with people experiencing homelessness and fragile economic circumstances. Hearing this recording, made more than 60 years ago, felt uncomfortably relevant to my daily work. These voices could belong to anyone, anywhere, right now.The lyric “A Begging I Will Go” is borrowed from an ancient English folk song, first printed on a black-letter broadside in 1684. And still today, all over the world, people wake each morning to the same words: A beggi

"Sapeh (type of three-stringed boat lute) being played": the instrument was recorded in Sarawak by collector Leslie Bennett.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.Recorded by W. Leslie Bennett.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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 Berber (Ait Haddidu) music and soundscapes made by members of the Oxford University Expedition to the Atlas Mountains of Southern Morocco in 1961.Recorded by Audrey Butt, Michael R. Emerson or Ralph Hudson Johnson.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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 large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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 listened to the piece and researched any historical links between Plymouth, my home town and Sarawak, were the original recording by Leslie Bennet was made. It turns out there were three white "Rajahs" of Sarawak and they were members of the Brooke dynasty: James Brooke, who founded the rule in 1841; his nephew Charles Brooke, who succeeded him; and Charles' son, Charles Vyner Brooke. Although not from Plymouth, all three of the “Rajahs of Sarawak” are buried in the small churchyard of St Leonard's at Sheepstor on Dartmoor, just outside of Plymouth. James Brooke did at one time set sail from Plymouth in 1838, arriving at Sarawak the following year.The name for Sarawak means the land of the hornbill. This piece is an ode to this journey. I listened to the recording of the Sapeh and learnt the rough pentatonic scale used. I isolated a few segments and tried them on guitar to get the ideas flowing. The recording of the Sapeh is sampled and utilise throughout the piece. At times I have used it to double the ba

The field recording that inspired this composition features a Bayaka musician playing the geedal, an instrument whose sound is deeply connected to the forest, communal memory, and oral transmission. When I first listened to the recording, what struck me was not only the melody, but the space around it: the breath, the rhythm, and the sense of conversation between the player, the instrument, and the environment. The geedal, whose timbre closely resembles the adeudeu from Western Kenya, where I come from, felt less like a solo instrument and more like a voice embedded within a living ecosystem. This immediately shaped my approach to the composition, not as a reinterpretation that dominates the original or places it in the background, but as a dialogue with it, allowing the geedal to remain the bed of the music.As a Kenyan artist working across traditional African instruments and contemporary production, I was drawn to reimagine the recording in a way that honours its origins while allowing it to travel across

The recording I worked with was pure beauty. A simple, pure sound of a conch shell being played - according to my further research, these conches can be hand-stopped to produce different notes and tones, and when played on the reefs in Vanuatu, can “make the whole reef resonate in sympathy”.Conch shells are also used ceremonially, for instance, to celebrate and denote the quality of boars that are killed for meals as part of a ceremony called Maki. A sound of beauty, then, but also of ceremonial significance - a treasure. At the same time, the sound reminded me irrevocably of a piece called “Conch Calling” from one of the ambient albums that’s had the greatest influence on how I think about music, Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel by Stuart Dempster. On this album, trombonist Dempster takes a troupe of musicians into a two-million gallon underground cistern, with a naturally cavernous reverb that turns the simplest melodic patterns into some of the deepest, most beautiful drones you’ve ever heard.

This project is inspired by a 1958 field recording of a Bamum girl singing a religious song in Fumban, West Region, Cameroon, recorded by Lois Mitchson on a ¾-inch reel tape. The archival voice forms the emotional and conceptual core of the project. The recording of the young girl singing praises about the Sultan Njoya who was part of the monarchy which dates back to the fourteenth century, is sampled and fused with layered percussion, reflecting the rhythmic richness of traditional African music, where percussion functions as both structure and communal expression. The title “Mwana Wevhu”, meaning “Child of the Soil” in Shona, draws from my Zimbabwean heritage and speaks to ancestry, land, and spirituality. Musically rooted in 3-step house, a South African subgenre of electronic music, the project blends Central African archival sound and culture, Southern African rhythm, and Zimbabwean language and identity. This intentional cross-regional fusion symbolises the idea that Africa is one, diverse in culture y

.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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

Natar (song) with Markany Lei on conch and Wani on musket.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen mainly on the island of Malekula (Malampa Province) in Vanuatu between 1960 and 1979.Recorded by Raymond Ernst Clausen.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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 songs and musical instruments made by journalist Lois Mitchison in Cameroon during 1958.Recorded by Sonja Lois Mitchison.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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

Drawn to the Circle began with a field recording of a boar tusk horn calling people into a full circle. The sound comes from Malekula Island in Vanuatu, performed by Melteg Ike and Mal Maru of the Big Nambas cultural group, and recorded by Raymond Clausen in 1962. When I first heard it, I was struck by how two players became one sound. It felt less like music and more like an invitation — a call to gather.The idea of the circle stayed with me. A circle has no front or back, and no one stands above another. Across cultures, people meet in circles to listen, to share, and to mark time together. In this recording, the call draws people inward, toward community. I spent time researching the Big Nambas people and the island of Malekula, using archival material from the Pitt Rivers Museum. Looking at landscapes and objects helped me imagine the life around the sound. The piece came together quickly after that, shaped by thoughts about what connects us as humans. I found myself wondering how a call rooted in one co

When I first heard "Mekana discussing a case of adultery", I really wanted to know more about the background to the recording. My research led me a to 1983 Granada Television Programme from the Disappearing Worlds Series which introduced the idea of "Benge", the poison oracle used by the Azande People of Central Africa to answer questions relating to, amongst others, infidelity. It was also vividly described by Evans-Pritchard as the process of administering poison to a baby chicken and waiting to see if it died or survived to determine guilt or innocence. Everything I watched or read focussed on the process of reaching this verdict, but there was never an exploration of the actual people involved. There must be a story behind these cases of forbidden love, in a culture where such feelings were prohibited and sometimes punishable by death. I wanted "Broken" to tell the story of this forbidden love, the feelings of loss the accused must have felt as they discovered they could never share a life together, but

“The Hills Remember” is a concept piece on the “domination paradigm” — a cultural logic shared across systems of oppression. The work explores the intersections of religious nationalism, religious violence and colonisation, authoritarianism, capitalism, misogyny, domestic and child abuse, gender- and sexuality-based violence, racial oppression, and rape culture — systems all linked by hierarchies of power justified through ideological and cultural narratives that normalise inequality and violence as methods of destabilisation and control.Initially inspired by a field recording from circa 1916–1919 of the Angami Naga singing their love song “Lozoruu, Hoiyi Ollie", the project took on a life of its own when artist Savannah Rae (Fawn Response) sat with the recording while researching the tribe and its historical context. After listening deeply to the emotion in the performance and reflecting on the lyrics — “though the villages are separated the herds graze together, upon the ridge there is a great stone to sit

A talea is both faithful and transformed. It remains genetically identical to the source, yet grows into something new through a different environment. It is not preservation or betrayal. It is organic continuation, the way traditional music has always moved through time and space.Our composition embodies the talea principle by maintaining an unbroken genetic thread to the source field recording while allowing that material to flourish in an entirely new sonic environment. The original recording serves not as a piece to be preserved intact, but as living genetic material — its essential characteristics, its rhythmic DNA, remain present throughout our transformation. Yet just as a talea cutting develops new leaves, new branches, new forms of expression when planted in different soil, our work has reimagined these elements through a compositional language that could not have existed in the original context.The melodic contours, harmonic implications, or rhythmic gestures embedded in the field recording have be

I selected the recording of a night forest in the Central African Republic without looking at the description, simply because it sounded magical. I usually search the recorded sounds for inspiration to tell stories that are more or less personal, but this time it was different. As I started reading about the origin of the sound, chosen solely for its magical aspect, I found myself lost in the discovery of a real-life hero who devoted his life to the collection, protection and conservation of the sounds and culture of the Bayaka people. I met legendary ethnomusicologist and fantastic human being, Louis Sarno. From that moment, I felt that I could not use the rainforest sound as a simple backdrop for my personal musing, I felt the need to bring back to life the magic of the forest and the love and passion that Louis Sarno devoted to his life’s work. The word "magic" that drew me to select this specific recording, kept echoing in my head, so I let the magic guide me, and what could be more magical than an incan

"Lozorüü" (tune: "Hoiyi Olle"): an Angami Naga love song performed by two men and two young women ("Though the villages are separated the herds graze together./ Upon the ridge there is a great stone to sit on").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.———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

Geedal (bow harp) played in the forest with male voices accompanying.From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.Recorded by Louis Sarno.Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.———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

Researching this sound and the U’wa people gave me an opportunity to scratch the surface of their deeply complex seasonal customs, involving dance, storytelling and performance. Ann Osborn (the sound recordist) documents this in her study "The Four Seasons of the U'wa: A Chibcha Ritual Ecology in the Colombian Andes".What I learned inspired me to tell a new story. In this piece you hear about Ray Collective, a dance group who couldn't be more culturally, temporally or geographically removed from the U’wa, but for whom performative seasonal ritual is the connective tissue. Looking back on it, I can see how this piece subconsciously reflected my wrangling with the ethics of this project and concerns I had around cultural appropriation. It's interesting that even in Ray Collective, where members are drawing from and reworking a shared UK-based cultural/folk heritage, similar themes about what constitutes respectful reinterpretation and what is fair to use or repurpose came up a lot. It got me thinking about the