Cities And Memory

This recomposition begins from a deep interest and curiosity towards the material life of the archival recording itself. The source comes from the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum: wax cylinder recordings of Naga (Angami, Sümi, Lotha, Chang, and Sangtam) songs recorded between 1915 and 1919 by administrator and anthropologist John Hutton. Rather than treating the recording of a polyphonic song as a transparent document of the past, I approached it as a dense and opaque sonic field — one in which voice, noise, damage, and time are inseparably entangled.My primary impulse was to draw sound from within the crackles itself. The surface noise of the wax cylinder — its dense abrasions, hiss, fizz, and granular distortions — became a site of listening rather than an obstruction to clarity. Using filtering, time-stretching, modulation, reverberation, and layering, I created a series of tracks foregrounding the submerged voices and textures, amplifying tonalities already present within the recording rather