Yeyi

Hearing the vocal music of the BaAka for the first time was a powerful, emotional experience for me. This led me to explore some of the other sounds in the Louis Sarno archive, and to his book and film "Song from the Forest", where I learned more about the context and culture behind this music.

In arranging and orchestrating my piece, which blends electronica with neocIassical elements, I wanted to reflect elements of nature. I used calabash, seed based shakers, and deeper, shamanic drums to reflect the forest, with its earthy, natural rhythms. In the original field recording I noticed bright flickers of birdsong around the BaAka voices, and I wanted to leave these environmental sounds in the mix. Later in the piece I introduced higher sounds like strings and voices, a call towards the infinite sky beyond the high forest canopy, and I wove some electronic colours and textures, like tape processed synths and arpeggiators, around the whole.

Listening to the BaAka recordings, I hear a joyful positive energy resonating in the music, but I also feel a poignant melancholy, perhaps a response to my ongoing learning about the fragility of this unique culture, a way of life that harmonises with nature rather than living in opposition to it. Competing interests in the Congo Basin Rainforest continue to threaten the BaAka, and the destruction of their forest habitat continues.

This composition is my reflection on the uniqueness and fragility of this ancient way of life, a way of life that has so much to teach us.

Bayaka women singing yeyi in the forest reimagined by Neil Foster.

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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