Wading through the crackles, hisses and surfaces of time

This recomposition begins from a deep interest and curiosity towards the material life of the archival recording itself. The source comes from the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: wax cylinder recordings of Naga (Angami, Sümi, Lotha, Chang, and Sangtam) songs recorded between 1915 and 1919 by administrator and anthropologist John Hutton. Rather than treating the recording of a polyphonic song as a transparent document of the past, I approached it as a dense and opaque sonic field — one in which voice, noise, damage, and time are inseparably entangled.

My primary impulse was to draw sound from within the crackles itself. The surface noise of the wax cylinder — its dense abrasions, hiss, fizz, and granular distortions — became a site of listening rather than an obstruction to clarity. Using filtering, time-stretching, modulation, reverberation, and layering, I created a series of tracks foregrounding the submerged voices and textures, amplifying tonalities already present within the recording rather than introducing external material. The duration of the piece remains close to the original, but the sound is folded back onto itself, allowing latent frequencies and resonances to emerge from the polyphonies. The recordings being done in colonial contexts.

Conceptually, the work is informed by Mark Fisher’s essay on the metaphysics of the crackle, and the persistence of the past as sonic residue, as well as Halim El-Dabh’s pioneering experiments with wire recording and mystique concrete. El-Dabh’s Wire Recorder piece in which he searches for an “inner sound” within the field recordings of the zaar ceremony offered a crucial precedent: the idea that recording technologies can open audio not just to preservation, but to transformation and speculative listening.

The opacity of the recording is crucial to the work. Its moments of unintelligibility are not simply technical blockages but reminders of a colonial listening context or as Dylan Robinson frames it in settler colonial contexts as “hungry listening” in which certain meanings, affects, and knowledges may never have been available — or intended to be available — to the colonial ear. What resists comprehension here becomes a form of sonic refusal, insisting on limits to extraction, transcription, and understanding.

The composition thus becomes less a restoration than a re-listening — an attempt to stay with the archive’s fractures, and to hear how voice, history, and material decay co-produce one another across time.

"Kukimi Lakuhu 'Le" (Song of the Kuki War) reimagined by bloop.

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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