Good afternoon everyone,

I’ve had quite a week! All is well though. This is a Fem Fri First as I am writing it on a train. It’s about found sound because there is a super cool new found sound LP from Nyokabi Kariuki:

There is a recording of her feeding mangos to noisy goats, but it is blended with gospel-style vocal harmonies and the sound of tuned percussion played on clay pots. On A Walk Through My Cũcũ’s Farm, you can hear Kariūki and her grandmother talking in Swahili about lessons learned from nature, but the footsteps and voices are accompanied by a quiet riot of harmonised humming, farmer’s whistles and electronic percussion.

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/mar/04/nyokabi-kariuki-peace-places-kenyan-memories-review

I always like to think about Delia Derbyshire too, and how it must have felt to have been doing all this stuff for the first time:

early electronic composers, like Delia Derbyshire, weren’t all that dissimilar from foley artists. As with foley, it was ultimately the job of these pioneers to hear the potential in a breath of wind, to envision the musicality of the neck of a wine bottle, or to hear the rhythm of the sound of clogs on cobblestone. The result: a process that was at once organic and alien, a distinctly human-made noise that was also implacably not of this earth.

https://filmschoolrejects.com/delia-derbyshire/

Love,

Alex.