‘I think there's always this force exerted from sound that goes beyond what the sound is in itself.’ That same force drives our conversation with KMRU in which we discuss how sound tickles our memories, our idea of home, and our urge to move. The Berlin-based artist contemplates the musical tapestry that ties together our experiences, thoughts, and dreams.
As a sound artist and researcher working heavily with the medium of field recording, Joseph Kamaru (otherwise known under his alias KMRU) is keenly aware of our sonic world. It is an intricate composition that backdrops and foregrounds the various moments of a shared existence; one that is so sensitive and subtle that one must at times, indeed, listen very, very closely.
His 2020 release ‘Peel’ marked a prominent turning point in his career; a long-form emotional evocation of ambient electronics that gathered widespread appraisal. Soon after moving from his home city, Nairobi, to Berlin, his work has continued to grow in dimension, navigating intricate themes of place, identity, and conservation. Appearances and performances at renowned festivals such as CTM and Berlin Atonal further position him as an increasingly familiar name within the sonic arts. From presenting cityscapes to ecocide, each of his works is posited within a prominent context that invites, above all, listening.
Those subtleties guide us in a conversation about what it means, as sonic beings, to relate to our world. From registering the sounds we understand to those we find unfamiliar and odd, we speak to the greater potentials of sound recording and intentional listening.
‘Listening is not neutral'
Recording with care
‘Text makes things concrete, ontologically. People understand what they read. But when there's sound, it's very nebulous. How are we going to understand this?’ To answer this question is an art in itself, a delicate task Kamaru is familiar with confronting. Listening, most simply, lies at the heart of this undertaking. But, listening is not simple. It demands attention, sensitivity, and perhaps above all, the acknowledgement of a first premise, which Kamaru underlines: ‘Listening is not neutral.’
This emerges most in the context of listening and recording revolving around places or happenings that are new or unfamiliar to us. In this light, Kamaru compares field recording and ethnomusicology: ‘Musicologists or researchers have in the past documented sound in a way that was too removed or detached from the people it interacted with’. And it is then that an important point is raised: ‘There are always these ethical considerations when you're recording, documenting, or even translating. Sometimes you don't translate it well, because it’s not how people in that specific place relate to it.’ Sound and context are inherently intertwined, according to the artist.
Be it with listening or recording, the conversation quickly points to a running undercurrent in Kamaru’s work: the practice of care. ‘Everywhere people are, I feel like I need to find a caring way to approach the space I'm engaging with.’ He exemplifies this best through his 2022 project ‘Temporary Stored’; a sonic exploration through archived recordings on colonial violence and the reappropriation of sound. ‘It took me almost a year to decide to work on the project because I wasn't sure where my position left me. After some time reading and listening through the recordings, I felt ready to engage with it. And even while working on it, I was still questioning if I was in the right position to do so.’
Being keenly aware of this, he emphasises stepping away from simply ‘capturing’ sound and returning to a practice of pure ‘listening’ instead; narrowing his field recordings down to just a few elements of particular sounds. ‘There are always conversational ideas and thoughts that I have when making music. Then there's always this idea of who I am in relation to the sound. I want to bring those noises, voices, and conversations together into pieces of music. This ongoing quest leads me not to record all the time but just to listen.’ In this way, Kamaru approaches listening as a research practice that goes beyond simply recording.
Be it with listening or recording, the conversation quickly points to a running undercurrent in Kamaru’s work: the practice of care. ‘Everywhere people are, I feel like I need to find a caring way to approach the space I'm engaging with.’ He exemplifies this best through his 2022 project ‘Temporary Stored’; a sonic exploration through archived recordings on colonial violence and the reappropriation of sound. ‘It took me almost a year to decide to work on the project because I wasn't sure where my position left me. After some time reading and listening through the recordings, I felt ready to engage with it. And even while working on it, I was still questioning if I was in the right position to do so.’
Being keenly aware of this, he emphasises stepping away from simply ‘capturing’ sound and returning to a practice of pure ‘listening’ instead; narrowing his field recordings down to just a few elements of particular sounds. ‘There are always conversational ideas and thoughts that I have when making music. Then there's always this idea of who I am in relation to the sound. I want to bring those noises, voices, and conversations together into pieces of music. This ongoing quest leads me not to record all the time but just to listen.’ In this way, Kamaru approaches listening as a research practice that goes beyond simply recording.
A tale of two cities
Rather than ‘translating’ the world he hears, Kamaru describes his music as a presentation of snapshots, inherent to space, place, and time. ‘It's like a collage of cities, noises, and people, turned into one thing. I model all these elements together, which do not make sense on their own, resulting in an abstract disfigured soundscape within one song.’ His most recent release, ‘Dissolution Grip’, perhaps represents this best. It’s an ambitious culmination of travels, recordings, and intricate composition. The result is a three-piece album merging past and present. From his family’s shed in Nairobi to bustling, glacial winds; all come together within a story rich in place.
Of all the places he has been, two distinctively re-emerge to shape Kamaru’s narrative: Nairobi and Berlin. These two find themselves together in the room of his mind, two cities in deep conversation. On navigating through sonic identities between places, Kamaru describes: ‘Sometimes in Berlin, I hear sounds similar to the ones I've heard in Nairobi. It becomes like a home you can relate to, something you can understand.’ With this, a new question emerges: how does where we come from affect how we listen to sound and conceptualise it?
'I need to find a caring way to approach the space I'm engaging with'
‘A good example is found in Swahili, the language of Nairobi’, begins Kamaru. ‘The ear is called ‘sikio’ and ‘to listen’ is called ‘sikiliza’. Then there's: ‘kusikiliza’, which is listening. Over time, I noticed that the word ‘sikio’ is at the base of every other word describing the ear or listening. As a child, I did not think about the functional meaning of sound in this way. Now I see that sound connects this concept of ‘listening’ and how people from different communities use the word ‘listen’ differently.’
Listening and sounds are, after all, culturally informed; from these collectively learned sonic vocabularies to specific listening practices and even further down the road to illustrating the ways in which we perceive our environments. ‘Sometimes you're in a new place and you hear a specific sound that's very unfamiliar. You try to relate it to something you've heard before, but you can't.’ For Kamaru, encountering these new sonic experiences is a constant process of discovery and learning. From moving between places to creating new homes, it builds upon a constantly expanding sonic vocabulary that transcends boundaries of space and place.
How sound transcends individualism
‘Sounds are often marginalised; they are overshadowed by other senses such as vision. This results in them sneaking into places not meant to be as we are constantly listening’, Kamaru laughs at his description, but the description is accurate. It’s hard for us humans to choose what to listen to and what not; it just happens. Vision, on the other hand, is limited to the scope of where you look at.
This means that sound goes beyond the physical boundaries we characterise with space and place; it also applies to the invisible boundaries we perhaps imagine between ourselves and others. ‘Everyone has their own way of perceiving music or sounds, and these sounds sort of transcend people's thoughts, because listening is constantly happening’, illustrates Kamaru, in the context of a live set. He describes how this physical, experiential capacity of sound transcends individualism: ‘Sounds can push the space and create a space through people's bodies.’
At times, moving between such spaces confronts one with extremes. In the auditory realm, the most impressionable of these can be the transition to, or from, silence. For Kamaru, the balance between noise and quiet, loud and low, is an important one. ‘I try to accommodate myself to not hear any noises and be comfortable with silence.’ He highlights how this can present new opportunities for learning, and ironically enough, for listening. ‘Sometimes we hear a lot in silence. Like new small sounds that emerge from silence, either from yourself or from space.’
Is silence ever too confronting? Kamaru takes the answer down another route. ‘It's funny you bring this up. Nights in Berlin are very silent compared to those in Nairobi, where there are countless crickets or bird calls. So when in Nairobi, I leave my recorder outside at night in the window so I can play the recording back during nights in Berlin that get too silent.’
An invitation for engagement
Kamaru highlights that there is always a context, social, political, or environmental, to his work. ‘A recording can be relatable to something that is happening in society. Whether a market or a demonstration; the context always informs the sound. When this is played to people, there's a way they can feel engaged or disengaged with the work itself because it has been happening real-life.’
In his recent CTM appearance in Berlin with ‘Oceanic Refractions’, the invitation for engagement remains an underlying premise. Ocean recordings of the reefs and shorelines home to indigenous communities in the Pacific came to the foreground, highlighting the urgency for conversations on self-determination and care in the context of an imbalanced climate crisis. Rather than forcefully imposing a particular narrative, Kamaru proposes sound altogether as a medium for creating space in which interaction is possible. ‘My music can accommodate this. It opens up ideas, or invites somebody to sit down and listen to this, even if it's not comfortable.’ This goes hand in hand with the raw, emotional evocation of sound, something he sees as not necessarily needing to be made explicit. ‘It's nice to leave the concept of the work very opaque. And I appreciate sound being able to be a carrier of these different political discourses and sort of dilute it, in a way. That keeps it open and provides an invitation.’
The vague nature of sound within structures that have long marginalised or oppressed other ways of knowing, of course, presents its challenges. On the concept of ‘other listenings’, he asks himself: ‘What are the other ways of listening? Sometimes in other cultures, there is a way of listening which is not similar to the West.’ Empowerment can come in the process of learning and finding ways of listening that one connects to, he emphasises, rather than morphing into a dominant status quo.
His last thoughts on the matter remain open, suggestive of the small changes we are able to make for ourselves. ‘I would invite others to engage in this listening, or sitting down in silence, and being comfortable with that.’
