Kinnaur calling

Created in collaboration with Kinnauri filmmaker Himanshu Negi Regesoi, this piece is a meeting of old and new, bringing a sonic archive to life from the Western Himalayas. 

From the Pitt Rivers Museum's sound collection, a field recording of women singing in the early 1980s (recorded in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, India by anthropologist Nicholas Allen) now becomes a portal for a young Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on his homeland/heritage. Through his voice a living thread emerges to celebrate a rich and dynamic culture - both ancient and modern.

The original field recording inspired various textures and loops created to take the listener on a journey from the dusty archives of a museum in Oxford to the vast Himalayas, evoking landscape and opening space for exploring how we deal with the past in the present - to inspire the future. The piece includes the following text from the Royal Geographical Society online exhibition titled “Reimagining the Himalaya through the lens of diasporic indigeneity”: 

“Archives are not just repositories of memory and imagination, they are complex and contested sites of representation deeply shaped by histories of colonial encounters. Whose memories do we elevate, and whose do we obscure? Whose perspectives do we validate to frame our understanding of the world and whose do we suppress? The key to these questions lies in the power to represent ‘truth’. Archives, therefore, are sites of power - the power to explain the world through dominant narratives.” 

https://www.rgs.org/our-collections/stories-from-our-collections/online-exhibitions/reimagining-the-himalaya-through-the-lens-of-diasporic-indigeneity
Footsteps on Wooden Floor.aif by ftpalad -- https://freesound.org/s/119914/ -- License: Creative Commons 0; heavy door open close outside to inside.wav by iggy1345 -- https://freesound.org/s/673236/ -- License: Creative Commons 0; Attic door opening and closing 2 by giddster -- https://freesound.org/s/805637/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

With thanks to Himanshu Negi Regesoi, and to Professor Alan Macfarlane for permission to use an excerpt of his 2001 interview with Nicholas Allen. Produced by Sonic-Soma. Mastered by Felix Davis.

Women singing reimagined by Sonic-Soma.

———
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