The Lion In Which The Spirits Of The Royal Ancestors

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The title of this sound collage comes from a line in David Lan’s book, Guns and Rain, about the role of spirit mediums during Zimbabwe’s war for independence.

The sounds were recorded with a Sony TCD-­‐D10 portable DAT recorder using Sennheiser MKH series condense microphones in a MS-­‐stereo pattern (omni and figure eight) and matrix decoded to stereo in post-­‐production. All assembly and editing was done in the digital domain with a Spectral Synthesis digital audio workstation.

While the legacy of British colonialism is everywhere evident within independent Zimbabwe, the sounds of an older African fabric of mind seep through the modern socialist and industrialized veneer. It is a fabric of integrated mentality where the persistence of spirit is understood to be an intrinsic component of daily ecological dynamics, This collage is not an attempt to document the natural world of Africa, its tribal remnants nor its modern counterparts. It is simply an aural description of the network of sound that communicates between these components that an outside traveller might be fortunate to hear.

Such an activity is at best problematic and at worst an act of exploitation. Just s the photographer cannot escape the patina of voyeurism neither can the phonographer. My only defence is to be as “up front” as possible. I offer these sounds as evidence of something worth listening to, not as just another digitally displaced entertainment nor as another highly dubious example of global cultural consciousness raising. My interest has been in composing an articulation of those patterns of the sacred which emerge or persist within (and despite) the contradictions and conundrums of rapid cultural change. By use of the word sacred I am specifically invoking a definition posited by Gregory Bateson: “the integrated fabric of mind which envelops us.”

While these sounds can be heard as further evidence of an environment, nation and world undergoing mutation and threat of annihilation, they also can be heard as evidence or processes of dynamical adaptation where the tribal and wilderness voices speak not only as something under siege but as phenomena capable of survival in a way that may inform our collective survival here on Earth. These are some of the sounds of one place in the world undergoing transition.