Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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 "mas...

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 walk...

"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 per...

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 projec...

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 r...

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 b...

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, reimag...

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. ——— Part of the project A Century of Sounds, r...

"Piano being played": recording of the second movement ('Sarabande') of solo piano suite 'Pour le piano' (L.95) by French composer Claude Debussy, performed by an unnamed pianist. 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 in Vanua...

Women singing and using grinding stones for musical accompaniment. 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. ——...

Weaving song from the Gower Peninsula of South Wales, recited by Thomas Penniman, former Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, who was preparing a manuscript on 'Work and Song in the North-west Gower' in his retirement ("Mrs. Tanner had six sons, and they all sang like thrushes while they worked at the loom"). From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a...

Silenced Soil begins with a fragile artefact: a recording of Claude Debussy’s Sarabande, composed in 1894 and revised in 1901, then recorded on 11 April 1963 in Gillitts, KwaZulu-Natal, by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen. Its only documentation is a handwritten note on a reel-to-reel tape box: “at Gillitt’s, copy of Debussy, Sarabande.” No pianist, no studio, no context. The archive offers littl...

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 fro...

The inspiration for this piece was the current climate and attitudes from a section of the population towards immigration. It is unsettling to see the resurgence en masse of sentiments I thought were well behind us. I used a fragment of a field recording from the Bamam tribe of Cameroon, and used it as an intro for my piece, which I divided into three movements. a) Mar Germanicus It uses an Arabic...

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of songs and spoken language made by anthropologist Northcote Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915. Recorded by Northcote Whitridge Thomas. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. ——— Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100...

This piece is built around a short fragment of an Igbo wind instrument recording taken from the Pitt Rivers Museum sound collections. The original recording was made on wax cylinder by anthropologist Northcote Thomas in Nigeria between 1909 and 1915. Knowing the material fragility of the recording, and the historical distance it represents, strongly shaped how I approached the composition. Rather...

"Bolivian radio programme on folk music": a recording of folk music from southern Bolivia issued by Radio Universidad de Tarija, with commentary (in Spanish). 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 Radio Universidad de Tarija. Cop...

Airwaves Unfolded is a piece based on a radio recording produced in the 1960s in Tarija, southern Bolivia, by Radio Universidad de Tarija. The program introduces Indigenous instruments and discusses how they have been intertwined with labour, daily life, and ritual, as well as how new instruments and musical forms developed after Spanish influence. What drew me to this recording were the instrumen...

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of cassette tape recordings of songs and instruments made by playwright David Mowat across several different states in India during 1987. Recorded by David Mowat. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. ——— Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 year...

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 Oxfor...

YAZ is a vocal and electroacoustic composition built from a field recording of an Aït Haddidou market in Rabat, captured in 1961. What struck me immediately was the presence of a young boy’s voice, cutting through the density of the market: a call. Not directed at anyone in particular, yet lingering. That voice became the starting point of the piece, an echo moving through time and memory. Researc...

The source material that I worked with was a field recording from the 60s in which someone in Morocco is singing a song, begging for bread. When I first listened to the recording, it immediately brought back a very specific memory from an old workplace of mine – an energy company had made a typographical error on their website, and when their customers struggling with energy debts called the phone...

 I was delighted to work with the recording of Aka masters Momboli and Gongé, playing flutes in the forest at night, recorded by Louis Sarno in the 1990s. I decided to retain the essence of the sounds of the forest camp at night, including the community of women, men, and children, as well as the wild shouts that are often parts of these moments.  For many years, I have wished to visit the Congo,...

The field recording from India immediately revealed itself to me as a form of male ritual music, rooted in repetition, gesture, and collective memory. From that first encounter, the piece began to take shape as an inner journey: a passage through listening, silence, and transformation. The opening unfolds in a dreamlike, immersive space, imagined as a temple. Here, sound becomes a threshold. Toget...

Momboli and Gongé playing flutes in the forest at night. 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. C...