Sea level rise

I ended up listening to this recording a lot in my everyday life, just putting it on and going to work, walking around the city I live in, in idle moments between work. 

I didn’t know an awful lot about Vanuatu, where the recordings were taken by Raymond Clausen in 1962. Having read the Pitt Rivers blog, I thought a lot about how people and societies move on and are changed, sometimes forcibly, by the world they inhabit, and importance of communication, across generations and across the world. Climate change and the threat of rising sea levels presents an existential, direct and profound threat to the lives of people across the global south, particularly islanders. The Vanuatan government has appealed to the world for help via the UN, which with the rise of the right and shattered consensus across the world is becoming increasingly toothless, but hope has to prevail. 

For the spoken text in this piece I used the information about the threat of climate change from the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Vanuatu to the United Nations over a sample of drumming at Wor Tamat, other electronic samples and guitar, with text read by Lizzie Lindsay.

Drumming at Wor Tamat dancing ground reimagined by Dermot Fitzsimons.

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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