FEATURE: Spotlight: KMRU — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

PHOTO CREDIT: Julia Sellmann for Pitchfork

KMRU

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THIS time around…

I am spotlighting an artist that I am new to. Joseph Kamaru is a Berlin-based artist/producer with a difference. Under the moniker, KMRU, he is mixing field recordings and different sounds to create a palette that is hugely evocative and original. I will bring in a review for his album, Logue, later. It was released earlier this year, and I would encourage people to dig it out. Before that, I want to source a couple of interviews that tell us more about an exciting and curious talent. Music Radar chatted with KMRU a couple of weeks ago. We discover more about his fascination for found sounds:

“Berlin-based sound artist Joseph Kamaru originally began experimenting with field recordings in his home city Nairobi.

Releasing music under the moniker KMRU, the inquisitive producer became fascinated by the timbre of redundant physical instruments and other stationary objects that he felt had ‘something to say’, then developed his use of contact microphones to capture environmental sounds with acute precision.

Using Ableton Live and Ableton Push as his primary arrangement and recording tools, KMRU released three albums throughout 2020 - Jar, Opaquer and Peel. The latter cultivates a rich tapestry of calming atmospheres based on the producer’s personal collection of field recordings combined with effects-laden electronics.

Meanwhile, Kamaru’s recent relocation from Nairobi to Berlin has required a period of adjustment - the thrum of Africa’s varied sonic backdrop replaced by the filtered disquiet of concrete city living.

What lay behind your interest in using found sounds to make music with?

“It began three years ago in Nairobi. I bought a field recorder to use as a soundcard but eventually started using it as a mic to record sounds on-site. I realised that there were sounds in my environment that I wasn’t aware of, and discovering that prompted me to engage more and use that discourse as a compositional tool.

"Eventually, I stopped buying sample packs and spent all my time outside recording sounds and taking them back to the studio.”

Is your objective to take the listener back to the environment where your found sounds originated from?

“It differs from project to project. With installations, it’s more about inviting the listener to be aware of their environment, so I’m not changing or manipulating the field recordings much. I realised that when I played back environmental sounds, for example, children speaking Swahili or cars passing by, people became very familiar with a particular environment.

"When I use the sounds in more of an artistic way, it forces the listener to figure out whether a particular sound is really happening.”

Is your music designed for listening to on headphones?

“I always make music on headphones and then reference on speakers for certain listening situations. When you listen on headphones you’re prompted to listen to what you’re hearing in more detail, and when you play it on speakers, new tones are being projected through the air so there’s a durational aspect, but I don’t have a preference to how Peel should be listened to”.

I would not normally seek out an artist like KMRU. I have turned onto his music. It goes beyond conventional and mainstream sounds. There is something almost otherworldly and transformative. There was a really interesting interview from Pitchfork conducted in April, where we got to find out some really deep information regarding KMRU. I will not bring all of it in. There are some sections that I want to highlight:

“Berlin is a quiet city, especially in the depths of winter, and the residential neighborhood of Moabit, ringed by waterways, is especially tranquil. Yet when I call up Joseph Kamaru in his apartment there on a recent Saturday morning, he has been awake since 5 a.m., thanks to a singer practicing in a nearby flat. Germans are notoriously testy about noise—it’s illegal to toss glass bottles into the recycling container on Sunday, lest the shattering glass disturb someone’s day of rest—and the vocal exercises had elicited a chorus of outrage throughout the apartment block, the neighbors’ stern barks blending with the singer’s scales and bouncing off the courtyard’s brick walls.

“I wanted to record it but I was so sleepy,” says the 24-year-old musician better known as KMRU, who has been living in the German capital since October, when he enrolled in a graduate program for Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste. Unable to muster the energy to find his recorder, he flopped over and tried to return to sleep amid the cacophony of an early-morning civic breakdown.

It would have been an uncharacteristically noisy recording for Kamaru. For the past few years, he has been working the sounds of his surroundings into meditative ambient music. He captures sonic snapshots with his handheld recorder and then collages the pieces into lengthy drones where the real-world reference points dissolve into a haze. His early, more upbeat work dates back to the mid-2010s, but his 2020 album Peel marked a clear breakthrough. Imbuing supersaturated tone colors with the depth of a Rothko painting, Kamaru exerts a powerful pull; his tracks—some 13, 15, even 23 minutes long—are obsidian-colored lakes that beckon the listener to sink into their lightless depths.

For many, Peel came along at precisely the right time: July 2020, as the initial shock of quarantine was turning to monotony. The music’s contradictory character—seemingly static on the surface, yet harboring a wealth of detail once your ears become attuned to it—proved uncannily suited for the doldrums of the pandemic. It’s a lockdown record through and through: Kamaru recorded it in early April last year, shortly after returning to Nairobi from a workshop in Montreal and seeing his plans for 2020—his job teaching guitar, an appearance at Ableton Loop Summit followed by a short European tour, his annual return to Uganda’s Nyege Nyege Festival—fall like dominoes.

Using street sounds from near his home in Nairobi, along with nature recordings from Lunkulu, an island in Uganda, and background ambiance from Montreal, he recorded the album across two days of improvisations, seated at his laptop, slowly turning knobs to stretch his samples into unrecognizable shapes. He sent it to three labels; only Editions Mego, a Viennese experimental imprint, got back to him. Label founder Peter Rehberg was stuck in Berlin for the first phase of lockdown, with little to do but go through demo emails. “Peel became my soundtrack during those weeks,” he says. Like a homeopathic treatment, its curious sense of suspended time seemed to ameliorate the unchanging days.

Kamaru hails from a musical lineage: His maternal grandfather, also named Joseph Kamaru, was a titan of Kenyan benga and gospel, famous for songs that challenged the political establishment. (The younger Kamaru has been reissuing the elder’s music on Bandcamp in the last couple of years; the ultimate goal is to establish a formal archive, perhaps a museum.) Growing up, his name left him little room to hide—all his teachers were aware of his grandfather. “I couldn’t skip class,” he says with a laugh. “Since he died, in 2018, there’s a burden that fell out of nowhere: ‘Kamaru, now it’s your time.’”

Though he grew up singing in the choir and playing guitar, it wasn’t until he started making music on the computer that Kamaru found his own path. In high school, he realized that the school’s computers came equipped with the digital audio workstation FL Studio. The only problem: None of the teachers knew how to use it. So Kamaru and a few of his classmates taught themselves. “There were three of us in my class who were into production, and we’d lock ourselves into the computer lab at night,” he recalls. With the help of another classmate, he learned Ableton Live; they finished a song together, a lilting tropical-house tune called “Feeling,” and even got it signed to a German label, Black Lemon, kicking off a stretch of releases informed by progressive house and Afro house. One early track was included on a compilation from deadmau5’s Mau5trap label, making KMRU probably the only artist to have both Skrillex and Sunn O))) as label mates.

When you’re doing field recording around Nairobi, how do people respond to you?

My friend from Berlin was in Nairobi and she wanted to buy fabric. There’s this town called Eastleigh with a Sunday market that I wanted to visit and collect sounds. I remember this guy coming up to me—he asked me if my recorder was a bomb. Then I gave him my headphones to listen to and he was wowed. He wanted to go everywhere and listen to the sound.

I did an interesting project in 2018 in Kibera. It’s the hugest urban slum in Africa. People don’t go to this place because they think it’s unsafe. I was doing a film project with a friend, collecting sounds. We were walking in different shops with my recorder, and some people would refuse to let me record the sounds of the place. We would insist: It’s only the sound! We’re not taking pictures of you. It’s interesting. Why wouldn’t you want me to record you when you’re sewing clothes? I just wanted this sewing sound. But some people were excited—they want the sounds of the place to be heard.

There’s a real melancholy beauty to some of your albums, like Peel and Jar.

I think that’s just how I am personally—I’m very calm and still and introverted. I just share how I feel through my sound pieces. When I was playing techno or DJing, there was a point where I just wanted people to listen to how I was feeling with sounds. But it was hard because people didn’t want to listen. They wanted to dance. That’s good, I enjoy dancing, too. But I’m trying to invoke this listening situation. For me, the best way to do that is with field recordings. An artist who uses his voice as the main instrument, you’re listening to the lyrics. But with field recordings, you’re listening to the surroundings. There’s so much to learn and understand from our surroundings with these sounds. You need to listen”.

Before rounding off, it is time to quote a review of KMRU’s excellent album, Logue – though, at nine tracks, maybe one can label it as a mini-album. When they heard Logue, this is what Loud and Quiet had to say:

“There’s an almost intimating depth to the sprawling, intricate music of KMRU. On the surface, it nods towards giants of ambient and drone like William Basinski and Tim Hecker, all seismic pads and glacial pacing. On further inspection, though, there’s something else going on here, woven between the processed field recordings that evoke the likes of Manchester’s Space Afrika or Stuart Hyatt’s Field Works project; something a little more dynamic and tactile than the occasionally monolithic impenetrability of many established ambient artists.

KMRU’s background may be instructive. He’s originally from Nairobi, though he’s lived in Berlin, and his grandfather was the musician and activist Joseph Kamaru, whose blend of jazz, gospel, Benga and Kikuyu folk brought him considerable fame across East Africa in the 1960s and ’70s. Kamaru’s highly political music placed him in a turbulent, sometimes dangerous position in the Kenya of that period, as the struggles and tensions of the newly postcolonial country led to conflict.

His grandson’s music doesn’t deal with this complicated history head-on, nor should it have to. It is, however, important to bear it in mind when trying to understand this shifting, amorphous work, whose beauty reveals itself gradually. There’s real complexity here, in the product of an artist whose life and familial experiences have given him a highly distinctive approach and insight. Time invested in Logue will be rewarded in rich, unexpected ways”.

I shall leave it there. Do go and check out the music of KMRU. He is a really promising artist and producer. Check out his official website, as there is much more to him than his recordings. At such a strange and stressful time, he is a balm for the troubles. His work is incredible. Go and investigate a wonderful figure who I hope we will be hearing from…