KMRU: Dissolution Grip
Navel-Gazers #72 is an interview with Joseph Kamaru a.k.a. KMRU who is going to talk to us about Dissolution Grip. Everyone once in a while, the thing which draws me into an album is the liner notes, and I don’t remember how I ended up reading them on this particular occasion, but the concept of ‘Dissolution Grip’ instantly caught my attention as something unique. It’s an album not of field recordings, but - in a way - about field recordings, on which none of the original recordings remain. Instead, their visual waveforms serve as a model for the sounds we ultimately hear on the album: lifelike tone worlds constructed from raw, electronic synthesis. It strikes me as rare for music to be representational in this way - all the most conventional music, in fact, typically expresses itself in abstractions whose connection to the sound palette of everyday life is near-indiscernible. ‘Dissolution Grip’, more than any album I can think of, resides at the opposite end of that spectrum, a radically representational work wherein the artist paints us a sonic impression of phenomena experienced out in the world. That artist KMRU - who hails from Nairobi, Kenya - is dialling in to talk to me from Berlin, a city where he’s been based while earning some well-deserved exposure to European audiences in the past few years. Let’s get a grip and talk to KMRU!
AC: Thanks for joining me! Please tell us about your background in terms of your first experiences with music.
KMRU: I think my most innate memory of listening to music or experiences with music was as a kid, playing cassette tapes of my grandfather’s music. Music was pretty dominant in the house and also with my dad driving, we used to have cassette tapes playing in the car. Mostly when we went to the countryside I remember journeying through the way with Kikuyu music, like Benga music.
I remember also when my parents bought a boombox sound system, I used to play lots of hip hop music, in my early teenage years, 10 or 11. Music was always around me, in all different contexts. On the public transport in Nairobi, they have a real sound system culture. There’d be subwoofers in the back seats and everyone would want to sit in the back just feel the bass! And also really high frequency tweeters in the cars. As kids we used to watch these matatus pass by, wanting to go inside them.
So those are my memories as a child with music and sound.
AC: We could use subwoofers on the buses here in London!
At Navel-Gazers, we choose an album to discuss. Ordinarily if the artist’s discography offers a choice between field recordings and electronics, I will choose the field recordings every time. But I broke my pattern on this occasion because I was so interested in how you used field recordings as a model for electronic synthesis on ‘Dissolution Grip’. Tell me about:
…how you came up with this idea?
…what field recordings you used?
…what techniques you used?
…what you discovered from doing it?
KMRU: ‘Dissolution Grip’ came about when I’d stopped doing field recordings a lot, and was thinking about field recordings from different perspectives. This was when I was still studying in school, in Berlin doing my Masters. I had this idea of using spectrograms on my field recordings and studying the waveforms of how the recordings appear on an image, and replicating that with just synthesis.
That was the idea that I wanted to study in the beginning. My idea was that field recordings are basic tones that happen in nature, and that waveforms or sine waves are the most basic tones which can generate any sounds.
Using this as my starting point, the field recordings that I used were from different cities that I’d been to, where I was still recording sounds but not for something specific. There are lots of field recordings from Nairobi, Uganda, Montreal, Berlin, St. Petersburg… places that I’d traveled in different parts of the world but then I was picking only one field recording.
For example the track Till Hurricane Bisect, it’s a windmill that I recorded in Antwerp, and I was listening to the slowness of how it changes, like an LFO. I was trying to replicate that at the beginning of the piece. I had graphic scores of each piece - there are only two pieces on the album and I made graphic scores for each of the pieces. I could also share those with you because I wrote a paper about this whole project, which was more of a contextual study that I was trying to do around it. But I made two scores for each piece. So instead of going out and using a field recorder I was sketching out the sounds that were happening in the space.
I remember when I made ‘Dissolution Grip’, it’s interesting that my supervisor for class was Jasmine Guffond, who is also a friend and she also released on Editions Mego, so it was nice to have a friend who could relate to help supervise this project. She was really helpful with the theoretical side of it.
So for me it was just this process of how to approach field recording outside of the idea of capturing, and instead visualising the waveforms in a spectrogram. I was really happy with how it turned out. It also became a live set that I developed on. Interestingly the live part of the project doesn’t have any field recordings but it’s one of the most physical performances I have, because it’s just pure tones, based on field recordings.
AC: What is the photo on the album cover? And that title ‘Dissolution Grip’, it really caught my attention, where did it come from?
KMRU: The cover art was a picture I took. Most of my album covers are pictures I’ve taken, if not all. I’m a very visual person and I have a huge archive of images. This one was a photo I took in Santiago De Compostela, where I was walking inside a park. It’s a ladder in a childrens’ playground, but with the perspective of the picture, it doesn’t show that it’s a ladder you can climb upon.
But what made me choose this picture was this narrowing, it looks like there’s a hole at the far end, and there’s the perspective of facing inside this small hole. It just fit perfect with this idea of durationality of the pieces which were evolving based on the waveforms.
The title, ‘Dissolution Grip’, actually came from a poem - the two titles came from an Emily Dickinson poem - and the idea of dissolution grip, it’s this idea of dissolving. There’s this writer from Martinique called Édouard Glissant and he wrote about the grip. I was thinking about when you hold something, like a cup, you have to grip and how slow do you release? I was thinking about this also with the waveforms of the field recordings. But the titles came from the poem.
There’s also that idea of hurricanes: when waves build, and then cut. I always think about these things when I make durational tracks: how long can I stay in this moment, and for it to evolve into something else?
AC: Oh so the grip refers to duration, holding something over time.
KMRU: Yes.
AC: On a separate topic, I was reading how you had reissued some music by your grandfather, a Kenyan musician also named Joseph Kamaru. Tell us about this project.
KMRU: Yes, my grandfather was a musician. I’ve been doing this for the last seven years, reissuing his music online. Heavy Combination began maybe eight, seven years ago when I was still in Kenya. After he passed I started taking care of his archive. Over the last years I’ve been documenting, collecting, researching my grandfather’s music archive notes and everything around his life. This is the first iteration, the first publication of his work that encompasses his life musically. It’s been in production for the last three years.
It’s special that it’s coming out now, also in relation to what’s happening politically in Kenya, because he was also a political activist musician from the 60s. And we share the same name.
It was interesting going back to the music and listening, because it’s like an open journal for me to go back and understand my grandfather’s life, from the lyrics he was writing and from what was going on in Kenya, post independence. ‘Heavy Combination’ is this collage of music that he wrote from 1966 to 2007, in different styles and different eras. He made so much music, almost 50 albums, more than 1,000 songs. It was hard to put everything together but this is sort of a birds-eye view.
AC: Also, it seems that he ran two record stores in Nairobi, I was wondering if you happen to know anything about this?
KMRU: He had a record store in Kenya, I think it was called Kenya City Sounds which was named after his label, and was also the name for his band, KCS or Kamaru Superstars. I came to realise he was also the chairman of the pressing plant in Kenya back in the 60s. He also had a mobile shop, which he was selling his music from, and the Benga artists he was releasing.
But I remember this record store because when I was a kid I used to go visit my mom there at the shop.
AC: Reminds me of my own grandfather…
Are there other artists from Kenya we should check out if we like your music?
KMRU: In Kenya the scene has really grown. At the moment the artists that I could mention, I always mention them but it seems like every time I go back to Nairobi there’s always new artists.
There’s artists that most people know like Slikback, who is from Nairobi but living in Poland. There are some I remember from when I was starting out, besides Slikback there’s DJ Raph, MONRHEA, Nabalayo… these are musicians who were doing something very different from what was happening in the scene, because in Nairobi the scene is dance music oriented: house, techno, amapiano… but the experimental music scene was very niche. People knew the artists who were making weird music.
But now there’s more artists like Kabeaushé, or Lord Spikeheart from DUMA, or Nyokabi Kariũki… artists who are on their own tangents of what they’re making. It’s nice to see everyone take their own different routes. That’s how Nairobi is. Everyone knows each other, from the mainstream artists like Sauti Soul, to the Gengetone artists, to people who are not online making music. And I’m always wanting to put that music out, to be shared more.
The best way to find different kinds of music in Nairobi is really to follow the club scene. There’s always new names popping up. There’s also this platform called Santuri, and also one I used to run called Nairobi Ableton Music Group. We released a compilation. Sometimes I’m going to Nairobi, doing publications of artists or friends.
AC: What about in Germany, have you found many like-minded artists there with a similar approach or mindset?
KMRU: In Berlin - my base is between Nairobi and Berlin - there’s an influx of things happening in the city. Most of the artists I know here are my friends, people who have released on the same labels, played at the same shows.
But then there’s Berlin Atonal Festival - from the festival, so many other artists are coming to the town who are part of it. I actually don’t think about Berlin in the sense of people living here as artists because it’s very transitional. I’m never home so much, but then I can meet someone like Lucy Railton or Oren Ambarchi who will come to Berlin. It’s this place where I can meet so many people, and there’s just this amalgamation of things happening, and not only in the sound world but in many other fields.
What next for you, any current projects to mention?
KMRU: I have so many different projects, that I could mention or share at the moment. This year I’ve mostly been researching about open-source softwares and building systems with Max and Ppooll. I’ve just been experimenting a lot.
I also have this project with Elvin Brandhi, who’s a good friend. I’ve been doing residencies with her and we may have something come out.
And then the main project I’ve been doing is my grandfather’s, which feels like my album, or part of mine. So in hindsight it’s been lots of research, and also collaboration with lots of artists in different fields: architects, scientists, just more research based projects and residencies.
AC: That sounds like a good use of time!
I’ll be following along… thanks for talking to me.
Images
0) 'Dissolution Grip' cover image by Kamaru.
1) (Uncredited).
2) Waveforms by Kamaru.
3) Photo by Glauco Canalis.
4) Photo by Glauco Canalis.
5) Photo by Gösta Wellmer.
6) Graphic scores of field recordings, Unfolding I & II by Kamaru.
7) Photo by Ruiz Cruz.
