Distant

This piece is built around a short fragment of an Igbo wind instrument recording taken from the Pitt Rivers Museum sound collections. The original recording was made on wax cylinder by anthropologist Northcote Thomas in Nigeria between 1909 and 1915. Knowing the material fragility of the recording, and the historical distance it represents, strongly shaped how I approached the composition.

Rather than treating the field recording as documentary material, I focused on its breath, tone, and repetition. I isolated a small loop from the wind instrument and gently pitch-shifted it, allowing the sound to move away from its original temporal context and into something more meditative and suspended. The looping process emphasises continuity and endurance, while also acknowledging the artificiality of repetition imposed by modern technology.

The looped wind instrument is paired with a simple, evoking kalimba part, chosen for its percussive softness and cyclical nature. Together, the sounds create a quiet dialogue between archival breath and contemporary interpretation, exploring how historical recordings can be re-heard as living material rather than fixed artefacts.

Igbo wind instrument reimagined by Andy Truscott.

———
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