OutReached

"This composition is informed by the specific ontology of sound as being itinerant, displaced, dislodged and fleeting. Sound is always ripped from its source to travel away from one body to another, and from one place to the other. It vibrates and makes others to vibrate with it. It moves and in doing so absorbs the conditions of its environment, brushes against surfaces, bodies and other sounds. It remains tied to its original context yet creates a space of relation that leads to new connections. Sound in this context is therefore a spatio-temporal event charged with history, culture and relations.

"The source recording itself is uprooted and displaced. It is ripped from its origins; first as the sound of displaced bodies articulating a certain rupture from home, and second as a material ripped from its physical origin by the very act of recording and reshaped by the subjectivity of the microphone and the ears that were pointing it. The subject of the recording itself is also a complex musical weave that entails histories of colonialization, indigenous cultures, and multiple lands. To add to this complexity, Spain being the location of this recording is a return to a distant origine. As one end of the Son Jarocho thread, as the echo of a distant past, “a faded facsimile of the original sound”. Thus, the central theme of migration, its ecology, bidirectionality, intrinsic homelessness and double consciousness are all at the very fabric of this source recording.

"With these notions in mind, I began by positioning myself with respect the source recording. I examined my personal relation to Mexico as the cultural source and the broader context of this recording. Being a diaspora myself, ripped from home and displaced, I had a very subjective and a rather complex relation with this recording. It resonated with my continuous longing to reconnect with my own homeland but also renewed my deep appreciation for the culture and the people of Mexico that I am also away from. So, for me being distant from a land beyond reach and a desire to reconnect with it is a theme that this recording embodies at many levels.

"Imagining the ritual captured in this recording as a call for home, OutReached is an answer to this call. It stretches this call beyond its acoustic limits across the ocean all the way back “home”. A home that is reimagined through my non-Mexican ears. Through my felt knowledge and sensorial memories and field recordings of Mexico as well as through my own lived history of migration. Except for the source recoding itself, all other sounds and field recordings used in this composition were recorded in different parts of Mexico. Even the impulse response of a rather large exhibition chamber in Mexico was used for the convolution reverb!

"Trusting that these sounds were fundamentally bound by their cultural context and common origins, my process of composition was anchored in an agentive and organizational listening to reveal these sounds' common stories. This enabled the sounds to speak for themselves and for the relations they embody to emerge as the musical experience; some due to my intervention as a composer and some beyond my comprehension of the materials and their intrinsic relations. I listened for serendipitous moments of coming together, be it harmonic, rhythmic, textural, spatial, etc. and reimagined a home for the fragments of the source recording to meander across. These far away fragments consist of the unprocessed source recording, its granular swishes as well as the voice in the source recording and the rest of the recording separated from each other via AI tools to add yet another level of rupture while allowing for more compositional freedom." 

Jarocho folk music reimagined by Saadi Daftari.

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