A Century of Sounds

A Century of Sounds sound installation at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford

Durei-na-mbwe 2.0 features in the Cities and Memory sound installation

I have contributed a sound piece for the Cities and Memory, A Century of Sounds project. The project is a collaboration with Pitt Rivers Museum and Oxford University. 100 artists were selected to re-imagine 100 field recordings from the Pitt Rivers sound archive, containing recordings of musical practices from around the world over the past 100 years (since 1926). Each artist was allocated a recording and tasked to create a sound piece based on the original recording, manipulating and transforming it into something new.

The recording I got to use was Durei-na-mbwe (song) by the Broken Consort, with Samuel on bu-wahr-wahr (panpipes), accompanied by Dominique, Erine, Ferdinand and Marineau. Which belongs to 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.

I listened to the original Durei-na-mbwe by the Broken Consort (1961) on repeat for about three weeks before I started to work with it; the haunting melody of the vocals and panpipes became an earworm and, as I heard these sounds circulating in my head, they started to morph into additional layers of rhythms and harmonies.

My track, “Durei-na-mbwe 2.0” plays with notions of time, decay and transformation. I wanted to capture the embodied experience of me listening to and imagining the original recording through a contemporary lens.

I created my track entirely using samples of the original recording, which I have sampled, modified and rearranged using an Elektron Digitakt and the Granulator plug in in Ableton, with the aim of capturing and conveying what I could hear inside my head.

My first step was to bring out the depth of the drums using EQ and resonators, whilst preserving the key qualities of the original recording, such as the crackle of the reel-to-reel and the roughness of the rhythm, and, at the same time, to transform the samples into something novel. I created a range of percussive elements, and I used a section of the vocals and panpipes to create a harmonic melody that evolves throughout the track. The resulting piece of music embodies (I hope) the energy of the Durei-na-mbwe performance, yet transformed by time and my own experience of it.

The Century of Sounds project is presented at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on an interactive screen where you can hear all 100 pieces alongside their original recordings.

You can hear the project in its entirety on the Cities and Memory website.