Narathu

Temple bats in Myanmar reimagined by Pascal Savy.

"The inspiration for this track came from looking into the history of the temple in which the original file was recorded. the text below has been copied from this website:

https://luxurymyanmarrivercruises.com/dhammayangyi-temple/

The massive Dhammayangyi Temple was constructed in the 12th century (supposedly between 1167 and 1170) by the order of King Narathu, who was later given the name Kalagya Min or “the king slain by Indians”. Narathu claimed the succession of Bagan throne by murdering his own king father and his elder brother, who had been chosen to become King, in cold blood. Legend had it that the King felt guilty for what he did and was so worried about bad karma that he had the Dhammayangyi Temple constructed to gain merit and redeem for the sin of killing his father and elder brother. According to legendary tales, King Narathu supervised the construction himself. He set the rule that workers would have their arms chopped or even be beheaded if they the brickworks were not perfectly fit without a gap between two given bricks.

Unfortunately, the construction of Dhammayangyi Temple could never be completed. It was soon halted after the assassination of King Narathu. There are two main theories about the mastermind behind the assassination of the king. The better-known theory claims that the King was assassinated by a group of Indians dispatched by the King of Pateikkaya. Narathu was said to kill one of his wives, also an Indian princess, for having practice Hindu rituals. For this reason, in order to avenge his beloved daughter, the Indian King mandated eight assassins to get rid of King Naru right in the Dhammayangyi Temple. The lesser known tale states that the assassination plotted by the invaders from Sri Lanka.

Some people believe the temple is now haunted and say many of the interiors have been bricked up to prevent ghosts from roaming the corridors. true or not, what's sure is that the temple is now full of bats flying all over the interior.

My track is somehow an evocation of the damned soul of Narathu trying to return to the temple to repair his deeds and i used the sounds of the bats as a metaphor for the suffering inflicted by Narathu on his family and his people.

Technically speaking i only used sounds derived from the original file - no additional synths or samples from sound external sound banks.i started by eq-ing out the sounds made by people visiting the temple to only keep the bats. i then transpose the file (pitch shifting) and slowed it down thus generating new sound files. i also loaded the original eq-ed file into a hardware sampler and extracted some new sounds from it. finally i used a granular synthesiser to produce new textures derived from the sound of the bats. once i had all those soundfiles ready, i loaded them up in ableton and improvise with them until this piece emerged. i didn't use any external effect except for some artificial reverb in order to give some extra depth to the sounds."