Cities And Memory

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 rec

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.———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

Hearing the vocal music of the BaAka for the first time was a powerful, emotional experience for me. This led me to explore some of the other sounds in the Louis Sarno archive, and to his book and film "Song from the Forest", where I learned more about the context and culture behind this music. In arranging and orchestrating my piece, which blends electronica with neocIassical elements, I wanted to reflect elements of nature. I used calabash, seed based shakers, and deeper, shamanic drums to reflect the forest, with its earthy, natural rhythms. In the original field recording I noticed bright flickers of birdsong around the BaAka voices, and I wanted to leave these environmental sounds in the mix. Later in the piece I introduced higher sounds like strings and voices, a call towards the infinite sky beyond the high forest canopy, and I wove some electronic colours and textures, like tape processed synths and arpeggiators, around the whole. Listening to the BaAka recordings, I hear a joyful positive energy res

This track is based on the recording of Metimbo of the Aka tribe in the Central African Republic playing the Bubulu (Potbowl). I chose this recording because the rhythmic complexity of the playing was so interesting to me. At first, I was thinking of approaching this exciting recording through many pre-planned ways, but it was proven to be unsuccessful. So I decided to return to the recording itself and try to experiment as much as I could with the sound. I let the sound design go as wild as possible, and any musical elements should later follow it. The result is a track that is filled with many variations of the recording, achieved through multiple sound design stages. Every sound that is not a drone, bass, or synth sound is made through the extensive processing of the source material; this means all drums, percussion, textures, and glitch effects came from one origin. The music is wildly different, but I tried to keep the spirit of playfulness in Metimbo's playing intact during the whole track. The title "

Bayaka women singing yeyi (polyphonic song) in the forest.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

This was one of the more difficult pieces I’ve worked on, although it was enjoyable working through the process. I struggled quite a bit at the beginning, as the field recording has both harmonic & rhythmic structure which varies in tempo quite a bit… so I wasn’t sure how to approach this initially.After some thought and a fair bit of trial and error, I decided to pick up my guitar (and play the piano) and simply play along with them without overthinking it too much… so the tempo may be a little rough in places! Guitar and piano simply panned out to left/right, adding some bass/cello towards the end. I tried to match my chords with their harmony and I did feel as if I were joining in with them! I noticed the call and response structure in the field recording, so tried to incorporate this as well at either end of the piece.I wouldn’t say it’s very genre-specific, but it’s more me joining in with them and it’s from the heart. Hopefully it conveys the warmth I felt from listening to the field recording - I

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

Created in collaboration with Kinnauri filmmaker Himanshu Negi Regesoi, this piece is a meeting of old and new, bringing a sonic archive to life from the Western Himalayas. From the Pitt Rivers Museum's sound collection, a field recording of women singing in the early 1980s (recorded in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, India by anthropologist Nicholas Allen) now becomes a portal for a young Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on his homeland/heritage. Through his voice a living thread emerges to celebrate a rich and dynamic culture - both ancient and modern.The original field recording inspired various textures and loops created to take the listener on a journey from the dusty archives of a museum in Oxford to the vast Himalayas, evoking landscape and opening space for exploring how we deal with the past in the present - to inspire the future. The piece includes the following text from the Royal Geographical Society online exhibition titled “Reimagining the Himalaya through the lens of diasporic indigeneity”: “Archive

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of music and spoken language (principally Thulung Rai) made by anthropologist Nicholas Allen in Nepal and India between 1970 and 1981.Recorded by Nicholas Justin Allen.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

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

My chosen sound was a sample of a geedal (bow harp) being played in the forest with accompanying male voices, recorded in Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve. by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno in 1987. I was drawn to the sample on account of its musicality, not just in terms of the music and vocals, but the lilting patter of conversation and laughter that resonates in these conversational intervals, conveying a joyfulness and inferred novelty and humour at being recorded. At its base level it is so distinctly human and as such I wanted to use as much of the original recording as the instrumental basis for my reimagined soundscape. I began this process by splitting out the voices from the instrumental elements and selected a section of the instrumentation which I stretched and slowed to see what kinds of sounds and rhythms I could split out further and loop. This first iteration resembled the roar and might of the sea, which is ironic as the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve is located in the land locked country of the

I ended up listening to this recording a lot in my everyday life, just putting it on and going to work, walking around the city I live in, in idle moments between work. I didn’t know an awful lot about Vanuatu, where the recordings were taken by Raymond Clausen in 1962. Having read the Pitt Rivers blog, I thought a lot about how people and societies move on and are changed, sometimes forcibly, by the world they inhabit, and importance of communication, across generations and across the world. Climate change and the threat of rising sea levels presents an existential, direct and profound threat to the lives of people across the global south, particularly islanders. The Vanuatan government has appealed to the world for help via the UN, which with the rise of the right and shattered consensus across the world is becoming increasingly toothless, but hope has to prevail. For the spoken text in this piece I used the information about the threat of climate change from the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Vanuat

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 first 20 seconds of the track, heard the hummed murmur of a Ba'aka voice and thought, "I can work with that." It wasn’t until the next day that I heard the engaging, immersive, gently rocking polyphony that the murmur develops into. I learned that the Ba'aka musical style is over 30,000 years old, older than any continuous musical heritage. UNESCO describes Ba'aka music as a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity".For me, the beautifully simple, deeply resonant recording needed to be front and centre - ancient polyphony, charming music borne of and a reflection on the spiritual forest the Ba'aka inhabit, now under multiplied threat. Deforestation, civil war - commercial colonialism is eating away at their home and aural heritage, even conservation efforts. Intangible archaeology is being lost. What will matter is what we do with these sounds. It is hoped that by bringing the recording into another musical world, I can in some small way help connect with their heritage

I originally chose the field recording simply because I enjoyed the melody. The women sang the same melodic phrase over and over with slight changes. I felt like they were telling a story but, as I don’t speak the language, I had to look elsewhere for inspiration. I researched the mythology and folklore of Himachal Pradesh’s remote valleys and discovered a common ghostly tale. If you are out walking in the pine forest and you hear your name being whispered it could be wandering soul or "Bhoot" enticing you to join them. It mimics the voice of a loved one to tempt you from the path so don’t look back or you could be doomed.The original melody was in quite a complex time signature so I used short samples of the voices and played them in common time. I recreated the original melody and variations of it in different instruments which would be common to the area. I wanted the voices to sound as though they were calling from within the trees and echoing through the valley to tempt you to follow. I used Ableton Liv

"To See and Remember" is a composition incorporating elements from a 1965 expedition field recording from the Chocó Department, in Colombia, by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith, who were then fellow students at the University of Cambridge. The recording that I selected, made on 5-inch reel tape, captures the sounds of the local Emberá people playing music with flute, drums and other percussive instruments. During my research, I discovered a 100-page diary kept by the field recordists, now preserved in the archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Reading the manuscript, it became clear that Ambache and Saumarez Smith were deeply committed to presenting the sounds of a culture from an isolated part of the world – as they wrote in their diary, “we wanted to be put entirely in their hands.”While studying the manuscript – often with the field recording playing on loop – I realised that some passages of text could work well as spoken-word accompaniment to the composition I had already begun creatin

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

The original field recording was fed into a granular sculpting sampler to create bell like arpeggiated lines. Next, I chopped the field recording to extract key parts, intimate vocal moments, a solid stone hit rhythm and laughter. Isolated stone “hits” became drum parts, replayed and resampled then slowed. They began to sound like ghost drums, closing doors or belated fireworks. I recreated the rhythms, striking flints collected from Norfolk beaches and in a simple act connected across time for a moment, integrating them into the final track. I played modular synth parts, stereo panned over the recording, adding high tones and static improvised, sonic scribble. The final completed track has a dream like quality with a foggy, lost ambient crackle and haze. Voices drift in and out of the track, there is laughter as stones are struck and connect us through time.Women and grinding stones reimagined by Andy Billington.———Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the c

The field recording I chose is of a gentleman named Thomas Penniman performing an early 20th-century work song about weaving from the Gower Peninsula. It's a strange, compelling and mysterious recording, made in the winter of 1974. There's a repeated refrain, "Mrs Tanner has six sons/And they all sang like thrushes as they worked at the loom", which I loved. But then the song becomes quite angry because the sons have only been given half a herring for breakfast. It's not enough! Mr Penniman beats his fist, and it sounds like both a drum and a piece of wooden machinery thumping. The "song" in this version isn't musical as such, it's somewhere between a passionate poetry reading, an a cappella performance, and, as it goes on, almost like mouth music. Mr Penniman starts out in a determined, lucid way, but seems to lose the thread of the song as he goes on. I pulled at the threads of the recording's story and made discoveries. Thomas Penniman was an American anthropologist, and curator at the Pitt Rivers between