A lion's new pride

Jul 15, 10:59 AM

"I was immediately caught by the metallic sounds and percussive nature of the recording. The location of Greenwich and lunar new year theme also appealed to me as I used to work in the area and had a colleague celebrating Lunar new year at the time.

"Migration stories at their core always centre around people or groups moving from one locality, area, country to another and as someone who has moved around numerous times this felt like a great theme for musical interpretation. London is an especially fantastic city in this regard with many moving to the city from near, far and all over.

"Migration can often come with uncertainty and goes hand in hand with the unexpected and challenging. I used these ideas to inform my composition building my piece around the a-rhythmical percussive element of the recording. I employed one of my favourite techniques - phasing - to create the illusion of the piece falling in and out of time. Phasing is when multiple layers are played simultaneously at slightly different speeds which in turn creates a sort of galloping effect known as phasing. If left to run long enough it creates new patterns and rhythms within the moments of chaos and seeming randomness. I felt like this was a create was to depict the ever changing nature of migration. 

"The first half of the piece illustrates the process of "migration" and I look at the second half of the piece as when our protagonists have "migrated" - phasing rhythms play less of a part and the focus becomes more centred around textured chords interacting with the lunar new year recording itself, twisting and wrapping around the metallic noise to find a home within their new territory, their new pride."

Greenwich New Year celebration reimagined by Kye Perry.

Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration. 

For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration

IMAGE: Sue Wallace at en.wikipedia, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons