Project war drum

This piece began with the field recording: Bom war song and dance from Cameroon. I decided that rather than treating this recording as an objective document of place or cultural practice, I approached it as a temporal fracture in time, the past reanimated. I looked at the recording as a rhythm already severed from the moment that produced it, yet able to reengaged and affect the listener in 2026. This recording felt both ancient and current, both in the same moment, yet a sonic event which felt distant. Being an ever changing and varying rhythmic loop with vocal elements, it felt that this piece became the next stage in the loop's recurrence.

I was drawn to the idea that recorded rhythm, like recorded voice, folds time back on itself. Each repetition becomes a reinterpretation, producing a new perception with every cycle. The entire composition is derived from this single recording. The source material contained a strong rhythmic pattern which subtly shifted over time, revealing internal variations rather than static repetition. I was inspired by Steve Reich’s phasing work, particularly It’s Gonna Rain, as a mechanism through which to explore the differences which emerges. Sampling and beat-chopping techniques were used to fragment the recording into a number of loops, which were then layered against themselves at slightly altered timings to give both the phasing effect of Reich but also a polyrhythmic feel which comes in and out of sync.

Ableton Live’s follow actions were used to introduce a generative dimension, allowing loops to trigger variations of themselves. This created a piece which is only partially controlled, where rhythmic relationships and patterns evolve autonomously over time. I then divided the piece up into layers and registers, forming a structure comparable to SATB four-voice writing. 

The piece was the composed through live performance, with layers faded in and out in real time. I feel that the source recording persists, but only in fragmented, phased form. What is heard is not preservation, but sonic recurrence without a sense of closure.

Bom war song and dance reimagined by Neil Spencer Bruce.

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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