The Latest at Goethe

For five weeks, Sven Kacirek travelled back and forth across Kenya, equipped with his audio recorder. The Hamburg electronic music virtuoso was following the trail of Kenyan folk music. The result is a musical road movie. By Rita Seyfert

“Recording!” Sven Kacirek turns on the audio recorder. Cows can be heard from afar. Kacirek is seated in the small hut of Ogoya Nengo. The 70-year old lives in the village of Nyanza on Lake Victoria. Kacirek aims the microphone at the woman. The villagers have gathered in front of the mud hut to listen. Old and young, men, women and children; they are listening to Ogoya Nengo sing. They clap in rhythm and sway to and fro.

Nengo is a dodo singer. She sings of life and of death, of her neighbours and of Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan. She sings of what she thinks the future will bring. Her voice praises the fruits of the earth and the fertility of the mothers. If threatened by drought, hunger and death, her piercing lament touches one to the marrow. Kacirek switches off the microphone and says, “The challenge is now to integrate Nengo’s dodo music into a homogeneous framework of sound.”



Kacirek began exploring African folk music out of sheer curiosity. He admits that up front. He is interested in learning where traditional Kenyan music and his own music overlap and the intersections, Kacirek has ascertained, are many. The drummer also plays the marimba and xylophone and explains, “These are instruments and timbres that have their origins in African cultures.” The musical structure not only overlaps tonally, but also rhythmically, elucidates Kacirek. “The fact that my music is very rhythmic creates a large common platform on which we can communicate musically.”

At home in his recording studio in Hamburg, Kacirek will then approach these intersections experimentally. He is intrigued himself about how that might work. The project will be called The Kenya Sessions. He developed the idea together with Johannes Hossfeld from the Goethe-Institut Nairobi. Yet, first Kacirek will travel on from Nyanza to the eastern coast and collect musical recordings. He is seeking traditional Kenyan folk music far from the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa. He is accompanied by the multimedia designer Agnieszka Krzeminska, who is filming and writing a blog while on the road .

Kacirek has always been enthusiastic about experiments in sound. Drumming is his dream profession. While still in primary school, he covered old washing drums with wax paper and played on them with chopsticks. Later, for many years Kacirek researched brush playing. Drum brushes have thin metal wires that create a two-dimensional sound when whisked on the tom-tom. When Kacirek played that same brush stroke on glass bowls, wooden boards and wax paper, he beheld new realms of sound and frequencies. Kacirek’s brush playing has covered every frequency range. “Brushes on a glass bowl produce a high transparent sound,” he explains.

Now, Kacirek is venturing into a musical synthesis. He has brought ten hours of audio material from Kenya; a set of building blocks of interchangeable tone and sound components from a blend of various recordings. They include not only Ogoya Nengo’s dodo singing, but also the tones and sounds of Kenyan percussion instruments, children’s choirs and preachers rapping their sermons. Kacirek is also arranging and editing the background noises and the moo of the cows is recognizable in the integrated tapestry of sound. The result is post-cultural world music: acoustic, live and without synthesizers.

Kacirek’s experiment also testifies to the diversity of Kenyan music, for there is no one Kenyan music tradition. This is the home of approximately 40 ethnic groups, each possessing their own musical dialect. Ogoya Nengo’s dodo music is only one example for this country’s musical traditions. Its origins are unknown and whether the music has anything to do with the song of the bird of the same name is uncertain. Yet, the two certainly differ in one respect: while Ogoya Nengo’s song lives on today, the bird became extinct over 300 years ago.



The CD The Kenya Sessions is now available for sale. This summer, Sven Kacirek plans to tour Germany with Ogoya Nengo and Olith Ratego. Subsequent projects for more field recordings in Malindi are planned for September.