Silenced Soil begins with a fragile artefact: a recording of Claude Debussy’s Sarabande, composed in 1894 and revised in 1901, then recorded on 11 April 1963 in Gillitts, KwaZulu-Natal, by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen. Its only documentation is a handwritten note on a reel-to-reel tape box: “at Gillitt’s, copy of Debussy, Sarabande.” No pianist, no studio, no context. The archive offers little clarity. Sometimes it keeps its silence.Listening to this recording in 2025, I was confronted not only by sound, but by history. Why was Western art music recorded here, under whose authority, and for what purpose, during a period still shaped by colonial power? Before reshaping the music, I had to confront my own position as a descendant of European colonisers. This inherited legacy uncomfortable but necessary became central to the work, sharpening my awareness of cultural imposition, culture colonialism and ongoing calls for restitution.From this reckoning, Silenced Soil emerged. I treated Debussy’s melody as a fractured map: splintered, dispersed, and reassembled through chance. This approach draws on John Cage’s embrace of indeterminacy and my long-standing admiration for atonality in music. The soundscape is composed at 120 BPM (2 Hz), chosen to evoke both calm and alertness. A reflection of historical time moving slowly, yet demanding urgent re-examination. Within this framework, I wove voices and instruments from Zulu culture, women’s singing sound fragments, mouth harps, clapping sticks, and rattles — alongside electronics, loops, found sounds, urban noise, and synthesised textures and the original recording of Sarabande. I actively intervened in this source material, editing the refrain of Sarabande into fragmentary notes and embedding them within the soundscape composition. These elements meet not as opposites but as interlocutors, forming a threshold where suppressed traditions and contemporary sound worlds converge.Unanswered questions remain: Who was the pianist? Who authorised the recording? What ethical framework governed it? These absences are integral to Silenced Soil. What is unheard can be as powerful as what is recorded. And the soil? It stands for the restless cosmos, for the sand forever in motion across our planet. What drifts, what scatters, what is buried will, in time, be made visible. My compositional process is guided by intuition and curiosity; notation and atonality serve as a compass rather than a rule, supported here by research into the subject itself. My aural journey began at six at the piano, expanded through Germany’s 1990s DJ culture, deepened during my years as a contracted composer with BMG, and refined through studies in Sound & Visual Art at Middlesex University’s Lansdowne Centre for Electronic Arts. Together, these experiences shape a practice that moves fluidly between structure and instinct, inquiry and an enduring love for soundscape creation.Piano being played reimagined by Linda Himbert.———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

Ask this episode

“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

Transcript

Related