Int. exteriors (day)

The field recording that I worked with was a wax cylinder recording of a Zande funeral song. One of the things that really struck me when I first listened to it was how this funeral song is buried beneath the imperfections of its recording medium – you just hear this single impassioned, grieving voice breaking out through layers of noise and obfuscation. I thought there was something strangely poignant about hearing this almost century-old funeral song, originally intended to memorialise a lost loved one, itself having become an imperfect and dwindling memory.

Following on from hearing the recording in this way, I wrote the song 'Int. Exteriors (Day)', which aims to convey how it feels to find yourself momentarily severed from the material present moment. How it feels, for example, to be internally going through intense emotions but not feeling able to express them out in an everyday public space.

In terms of how the field recording itself is incorporated in 'Int. Exteriors (Day)'; the recording emerges throughout the song in a few different ways – it is run through a vocoder, adding a ghostly layer of harmony to the synthesiser and guitars that drive the music; and later on, samples of the emotive song bleed out in the composition alongside the crackles and hiss and artefacts of the original recording medium.

Zande funeral song for a woman 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