A Century Of Sounds

I was really pleased to be selected to be part of this wonderful project from Cities and Memory in collaboration with The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. It celebration 100 years of the museum's sound archive which features an incredible array of field recordings from all over the world dating back to the very beginning of recorded sound. 100 composers and sound artists were selected and given the choice of 100 curated and carefully selected sounds. I chose a recording of a Naga work song, originally recorded on an Edison wax cylinder in 1914. In part I was drawn to this recording because I actually got to see the original wax cylinder when I visited the museum at the start of the project and in part because I have a fascination for the Naga and their culture. It was a wonderful feeling to be a accompanying the ghosts of long ago. I wanted to reference the idea of the Butterworth/Vaughn Williams early 20th century reworkings of English folk music, themselves contemporary with the wax cylinder recording (and in many ways from a similar intellectual perspective) but then bring the piece gradually back to a more modern 'folk' interpretation. I used multiple layered Indian harmonium parts in the second half, partly in recognition of how a foreign instrument/idea can be introduced to a culture in an attempt to influence it only for that instrument/ idea to be a adopted, co-opted and made more 'native' than 'native'; one of the beautiful victories of the human spirit. I wanted it to be repetitive and hypnotic in recognition of it's work song purpose. I was honoured when my piece was chosen for the highlights album. You can hear it here: