{"id":97,"date":"2022-04-04T16:03:50","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T20:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/?p=97"},"modified":"2022-04-04T16:03:50","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T20:03:50","slug":"peace-places-kenyan-memories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/peace-places-kenyan-memories\/","title":{"rendered":"peace places: kenyan memories"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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peace places: kenyan memories<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Nyokabi Kariuki<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2022<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Reviewed by Shy Thompson<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Genre: Experimental | Label: SA | Reviewed: March 11, 2022<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

When Nyokabi Kari\u0169ki<\/a> couldn\u2019t go home, she listened for it. In 2020, while studying composition abroad, the Kenyan composer and multi-instrumentalist got stuck in her secondary abodes of New York and Maryland. With Kenya\u2019s borders locked during the pandemic, she had no way to know when she\u2019d be able to return to her hometown of Nairobi. But in her music, she retreated to the familiar haunts of her memory, constructing a likeness of home that began to distort into something tangled and dreamlike. Closeness to the place you call home brings comfort; distance can transform those feelings, magnifying the things you miss most. On her new EP, peace places: kenyan memories<\/em>, Kari\u0169ki invites us to explore a selection of visions that grew larger than life during her time away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kari\u0169ki\u2019s most cherished spots in and around Nairobi\u2014which she affectionately calls her \u201cpeace places\u201d\u2014became the seeds from which each track on the EP would grow. She had started collecting videos of these locales on her phone years ago, and they now felt like a sanctuary when she felt the ache of homesickness. \u201cI need to absorb everything, and sound is a way of preserving the memories,\u201d she said in an interview with Spitfire Audio<\/a>. Kari\u0169ki used the audio from these recordings as a base to build melodic sound collages, filling out each piece with relevant sketches of Kenya.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On \u201cGalu,\u201d the sound of waves swirling along the shoreline of the titular Kenyan coastal town is the compositional nucleus. \u201cI go down at 6 AM to swim,\u201d Kari\u0169ki repeats in a half-spoken refrain, as a cymbal softly skitters. The lapping waves intensify, and the percussion along with it\u2014a thumping beat and the rapid plucking of a kalimba break in, like cutting a breaststroke against the tide. Kari\u0169ki uses the chirping of birds as the central germ of \u201cEquator Song<\/a>,\u201d singing sweet harmonies over the discordant squawking. She sings here partially in Kiswahili, the national language of Kenya, and partially in Maa, as an homage to her Maasai<\/a> heritage. The decline in use of Indigenous languages due to British colonial rule<\/a> is a fact of life in Kenya, and Kari\u0169ki acknowledges her lack of fluency in each as an uncomfortable element of life in her homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time away from home can change the way you see things when you eventually return. When Kari\u0169ki was finally able to visit her grandparents for Christmas in 2020, she stored the occasion for safekeeping in the recordings heard on \u201cA Walk Through My C\u0169c\u0169\u2019s Farm.\u201d The moment feels lighthearted as Kari\u0169ki\u2019s grandmother shouts in her family\u2019s native language of Kikuyu about the difficulty of plucking an onion from the ground. But an anxious electronic haze swirls underneath, slowly rising to the foreground. The contrast holds a mirror to Kari\u0169ki\u2019s own conflicted feelings in the moment; there\u2019s a sense of togetherness, but she knows it can\u2019t last. \u201cPeace maybe always does come with disconnect and dissonance,\u201d Kari\u0169ki told Bandcamp Daily<\/a>, \u201cand maybe there\u2019s a bit of home in that as well.\u201d In her embrace of both the joy and the heartache, Kari\u0169ki paints a messy\u2014and honest\u2014picture of the places most familiar to us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

peace places: kenyan memories Nyokabi Kariuki 2022 Reviewed by Shy Thompson Genre: Experimental | Label: SA | Reviewed: March 11, 2022 When Nyokabi Kari\u0169ki couldn\u2019t go home, she listened for it. In 2020, while studying composition abroad, the Kenyan composer and multi-instrumentalist got stuck in her secondary abodes of New York and Maryland. With Kenya\u2019s borders locked…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benalbright.net\/nmc\/production\/project-three\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}