Durei-na-mbwe 2.0

“Durei-na-mbwe 2.0” plays with notions of time, decay and transformation; with it, I wanted to capture the embodied experience of me listening to and imagining the original recording through a contemporary lens. I listened to the original Durei-na-mbwe by the Broken Consort (1961) on repeat for about three weeks before I started to work with it; the haunting melody of the vocals and panpipes became an earworm and, as I heard these sounds circulating in my head, they started to morph into additional layers of rhythms and harmonies.

I created my track entirely using samples of the original recording, which I have sampled, modified and rearranged using an Elektron Digitakt and the Granulator plug in in Ableton, with the aim of capturing and conveying what I could hear inside my head. My first step was to bring out the depth of the drums using EQ and resonators, whilst preserving the key qualities of the original recording, such as the crackle of the reel-to-reel and the roughness of the rhythm, and, at the same time, to transform the samples into something novel. I created a range of percussive elements, and I used a section of the vocals and panpipes to create a harmonic melody that evolves throughout the track. The resulting piece of music embodies (I hope) the energy of the Durei-na-mbwe performance, yet transformed by time and my own experience of it.

Durei-na-mbwe (song) by the Broken Consort reimagined by Kim[bal].
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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