Nadeng's song - a lullaby in cycles

I listened to this beautiful excerpt of Nadeng singing to her child and the sonic presence of children and a baby. I grew increasingly attached to their voices and carefully traced their audible responses to each other. I read about the context of this recording – mother to child, mother to children, singing in South Sudan. The wars that have afflicted this place. The civil war that had recently ended, and the war that would commence soon after Nadeng sang in this recording. The traditional instruments and songs of the area and the people. 

I chose to use the field recording unadorned, foregrounding Nadeng’s singing - so her voice, the children, the baby and the incidental sounds, all lead the new music composition and sound art here, as I recast the lullaby into a song cycle, and in which contemporary instruments respond to all the sonic elements within the archive field recording. 

The woodwinds are in a dialogue with the voices from the archive recording, the percussion and bass supporting each voice (instrumental and vocal) – in a resulting song-in-cycles. In which two lullabies emerge, one instrumental, one vocal, weaving around each other, across time and across continents.

Credits:
Lullaby song - Nadeng 
Soundart and instrumental music composition – Elissa Goodrich
Sampled musicians:
Phil Bywater – saxophone
Gideon Brazil – flute
Miranda Hill and Tamara Murphy – double bass
Elissa Goodrich - vibraphone and percussion

Lullaby sung by Nadeng to her baby reimagined by Elissa Goodrich.

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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