A breath of time

"Then we heard the grass blades bending under the laziest hooves
but they know how slow they should be grazing at noon 

Then we heard the pine twigs snapping under bare feet and fresh blisters forming from the here and now because they know how fast good pain turns to fluid

Then I heard the tallest reeds breaking under boots of rubber and I couldn’t help but think of the 87 months it took those barks to become adult because they know when they’re ready to bleed

It’s when the man’s hands form the cup for the milk to rest and sit and wait and stop moving because they both know how long fluid turns solid so it can stretch and bend and stretch and bend again between hardened hands of fewer grooves than blisters

But the blisters didn’t know when that large cylinder would come to move things along and the man became two and they learnt each others’ names as they rolled and compressed and rolled and compressed again until the rubber was already rubber and the blisters were gone because the hands became idle while the cylinder kept turning for god knows how long 

So the men unlearnt how to tell time and the two men became one again and he no longer knew his name so was now just “the man” from somewhere he can’t remember and how did we get here?

First we heard the tallest reeds whistling"
Text by Yorgos O’Neill-Zafeiropoulos 

In this soundscape, I have worked solely with the original sound clip "Instruments in the forest at dawn (flute and harp)". This 1993 recording was made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno in the Central African Republic and features the Bayaka musicians Momboli on flute and Boyobi on the geedal (bow harp).

You will hear this clip around 34 times but at different speeds, making "time" — and therefore pitch — the main variable altered to produce the soundscape. No recordings or sounds of my own were added. At the end of the piece, you can hear the original, unedited full clip re-emerging from the warped soundscape.

Artist: Christina-Shelagh Mongelli; mixing/mastering: Matt Chapman; creative text: Yorgos O'Neill-Zafeiropoulos

Instruments in the forest at dawn reimagined by Christina-Shelagh Mongelli.

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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