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The source material that I worked with was a field recording from the 60s in which someone in Morocco is singing a song, begging for bread. When I first listened to the recording, it immediately brought back a very specific memory from an old workplace of mine – an energy company had made a typographical error on their website, and when their customers struggling with energy debts called the phone number for the company's hardship scheme, it reached the completely unrelated company where I worked. For about a week, I was answering the phone explaining to stressed people struggling to pay their energy bills that they had to hang up and call a very slightly different phone number to get the service they needed. When I tried to contact the energy company about their mistake, it was nigh-on impossible because they were largely using automated chatbots for their customer service. 

All of that influenced the atmosphere of this short track, and my decision to take the original recording and bury it amidst liminal-sounding distorted “call holding” music: even as our societies have ostensibly developed and evolved since the original recording was made - with technology and infrastructures becoming infinitely more complex - the same problems and tragic inequities continue on.

Ait Haddidu beggar singing for bread reimagined by Mute Branches.

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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