Looking for spirits

The recording I started with came with a description, which included the following phrase: "youths [...] drum on trees as they pass through the forest, sometimes spirits may drum the tree during boyobé ceremonies."

I was keen to both explore the rhythms and that sense of being joined by spirits - the ambiguity about who plays; as much in the lack of information about the actual individuals as in a spiritual way.

A photograph of these "youths" by one of the trees became a guiding image as I stretched sounds, resampled, chopped and rearranged, all the while trying to find the spirit both of and beyond the rhythm. Eventually these original and new patterns, skipping and jolting through an imaginary forest - meeting, somehow, across time - coalesced into this piece of music.

Gooma (tree drum) played with sticks reimagined by de Velden.

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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