Of Sound as Memory - An Interview With Nyokabi Kariũki

A Closer Listen

Photo by Gianfranco Bello, courtesy the artist

Nyokabi Kariũki has emerged as an exciting new voice in experimental music over the past few years. We will let her do the introductions herself, but it’s worth highlighting the blog she keeps over on her website, where you can find excellent essays like “On Learning That One of the First Electronic Works Was By an African, Halim El-Dabh” and more of her thoughts on music. We interviewed her via email, so the text has been edited collaboratively by both the interviewer and the artist, in an exchange that lasted some months throughout 2023. The main topic of the conversation is feeling body, her latest album.

David Murrieta Flores (ACL): Hi Nyokabi! Please tell us a bit about yourself and the kind of work you do, for readers out there unfamiliar with your music.

Nyokabi Kariũki (NK): Hello! I am a composer and experimental sound artist, and I perform too. I was born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, and then went to university in New York for music composition. From then on, I’ve just been music-making in different places — it’s become quite difficult to say where I’m based now, perhaps because I’m still trying to figure it out.

In my work I’m often exploring sound as emotion, sound as messenger, sound as memory. Sound feels so limitless, and so I love to experiment with it in different ways. My thing is sort of finding ways to ground my experimentation in African thought, whether it’s pulling from creators that came before me; applying concepts from non-musical African contexts into that of music-making; or simply positioning the languages of my heritage at the forefront of how I communicate in my music. It’s a journey, often a mix of many feelings, and often a combination of me searching for things, and things revealing themselves to me at the same time. I’m enjoying watching it unfold.

Something I’m realising about this journey is how my music also tends to stick quite close to my own lived experiences (it’s not always intentional!), but I reckon that’s because music has always been there in my life to help me process through things. In March, I released a record called FEELING BODY, where I was reflecting on being sick for a large part of 2021. It was hard to write, but I’m really proud of the work, and it’s also been really interesting getting into more live performances of that music this year.

ACL: I’d like to ask you about the title, FEELING BODY. It ties the body to expression, sentiments, but it possibly also points at a special kind of body – different, say, to a “thinking body”. In your perspective, are there various kinds of bodies? How do they relate to each other?

NK: Yes, it absolutely refers to “body” on multiple fronts. I think firstly and most importantly, it refers to the sick body. We perceive the world through a vessel that we understand to be a “body”, but often, we forget to listen to it when it needs us to (yet it is constantly listening to us). Being sick pulled my attention back to that understanding.

The other “body” that became a part of the record was that of water; I was thinking of this blurring between a “water body” and “human body”. The album art is by a dear friend Serena Seshadri, and she titled it Someone between body and water. I thought that was perfect visual accompaniment to the music I’d created, because in many cultures and communities (including in my own, the Kikuyu), water and healing go hand in hand. When I was sick, I would take these long baths that offered some kind of solace when I’d have these debilitating headaches. So in the record, you hear water in different forms, like droplets from a tap or ice crackling, and then in the final song you hear the biggest water body of all — the ocean.

The second part of your question, of how these various kinds of bodies relate to each other is interesting, because I think the concept of a body is inherently about various things relating to each other. Another “body” I was thinking about is the mind, seeing it as an entity that was in constant conversation with the physical body — but feeling frustrated that they weren’t speaking the same language when I was sick.

Photo by Gianfranco Bello, courtesy the artist

ACL: How would you say music is connected to the body?

NK: For me, music has always been a visceral experience. During my time at university, I received what you’d call ‘formal’ training in western classical music, and watched many musicians around me write music from a very detached, technical viewpoint. But I found it difficult to do that. A lot of the time, when I write music, I go with how it makes my body feel. I tend to have really visceral reactions to music that I like — even during my shows, you can really see that I feel each sound in my body. In many ways I think this goes back to having grown up in Africa, where movement and music are not separate, but always together.

ACL: The use of the voice across your work is extremely interesting. Sometimes there’s song, sometimes there’s speech, sometimes those two are the same thing. Now, from a certain point of view, the voice is our body’s main instrument. What role does the voice play in your work?

NK: My journey with my voice has been an interesting one, because I actually have formal training as a pianist, not as a vocalist. A couple of years ago, I couldn’t sing the way I do now, it’s only happened within the past 4ish years, sparked by a moment in the final two years of my undergraduate degree. My teacher encouraged me to start singing in my “weird” voice, because she noticed that all the songs I was writing didn’t sound the same when I notated them for other musicians. I was writing around the footprint of my own voice, around all its little quirks and strengths and imperfections.

As you point out, I guess it’s fitting that my voice, or the voice in general, is the main communicator on a record about the body. But I’ll also add that perhaps the record generally coincides with a period of me really coming into my own with my voice. Something I love about working with voice is how immediately you can translate an idea in your mind into music, compared with other instruments I play, where there’s extra steps I have to take. Of course, with voice you also have access to words, and languages, and that’s another thing I’m fascinated by and like to explore in my music.

You know, I’ve been thinking more about my body the more I’ve been using my voice. In the spring, I went on a brief tour in Europe, just 3 shows, and even that already was a notable learning lesson for me — like, wow, my body is the instrument. I have to really take care of it for [music], too.

Photo by Gianfranco Bello, courtesy the artist

ACL: I really loved the integration of voice notes in the album, and it made me think of recordings precisely as memory devices. Does your approach tie together memory and recording technology, in a way?

NK: I think often of sound as memory, particularly when I reflect on the fact that much of our ancestral knowledge as Africans was stored in oral literature. I like to understand my use of field recordings and voice notes as a natural translation of that.

However, with regards to writing the titular track in that record, I ran into a situation where I had to figure out how to talk about a difficult time while making sure I was safekeeping my own emotional health during the process. Initially, I sat down to write lyrics in an intentional way, where I was thinking deeply about what I wanted to say, but I hated it — it was triggering to try and spend so much time reliving what I’d gone through. So one day on my way home, I just recorded a voice note and let all my thoughts flow out, and perhaps you can hear that at the end of it I’m bawling. I listened back to the recording only once, chopped it up and left in the parts that felt right, then whenever I worked on the piece after that, that voice recording was muted.

In [the track] “fire head”, that’s also why you have this text-to-speech voice, because it was repeating a line I wanted to communicate, but didn’t want to have to say it myself. So in both situations, it was about caring for myself first while writing about a difficult time, and in the end that had its own interesting results.

Including voice recordings gave this snapshot of a sonic moment that will never really happen again in the same way, and I feel that allowing the rawness of the recording to be a part of the track made what I was trying to say come through in a powerful way.

ACL: What sorts of memories does a ‘feeling body’ produce? Do you think the body changes with memory or is it the other way around?

NK: In my live performances of music from FEELING BODY, I repeat this phrase: “the body is built to remember.” It’s a line that I had with me throughout the making of the record, but it didn’t quite make it to the lyrics — though I think it’s a fitting answer to your question. Every cell stores information from something that happened before in order to inform how it’ll act now and how it’ll act next time. So in this way, I do think the body changes with memory. A little pain here makes us form new behaviour to attempt to avoid it; a little joy there makes us want to replicate the circumstances that led us to that joy. It’s all tied to our body keeping a memory of our experiences. I think that’s how we become who we are. We are informed by our traumas, by our joys, and everything in between.

The other way around? Let me see. Do our memories change with our body, you mean? I think that’s true to an extent as well…

Photo by Gianfranco Bello, courtesy the artist

ACL: It’s interesting how in “fire head” the phrase “Are you OK?” repeats over and over, echoing like an anxious, neurotic blast that comes to be reflected by the trumpet, ending with a thunderous crack. When you’re ill, people put on you a pressure to be well, which you often end up internalizing. Is the voice also a potentially harmful part of the body?

NK: Oh wow, that question arrived at an interesting point there. It’s making me consider the voice as the sender, rather than a messenger, of our thoughts. And there’s many ways to look at it from that viewpoint: maybe “voice” here means our internal voice, and how that does have a role in harming us — I think of anxiety, something I’m rather familiar with, as an element of this.

In the track, there’s this main sentence: “they stopped asking if I was okay, ‘cause they knew the answer was not going to change”, and I chop it up and offer different fragments of it, as I think that deepens how you understand the overall sentiment. Then, there’s also a hounding text-to-speech voice in Kiswahili asking, “are you still sick? are you better now? how is your mind? how is your body?”

These two languages using different points of view suggest that one voice is coming from an internal perspective and the other voice is from an external one, but as the piece develops, it just becomes this cacophony where you’re not even sure where it’s coming from anymore…and maybe that’s how the voice does start to get harmful to the body, when you can’t differentiate anymore, and you have to fight your own thoughts in order to hold onto some kind of hope or relief.

Oof. It can be tough. That’s one of the tracks I tend to skip whenever I’m re-listening to my record.

ACL: In the notes you state that you’re sharing your pain, but with a measure of protection. What from – is it the pain itself, the memory of pain, or perhaps something else?

NK: I touched on this in a question earlier, but to explain a bit more — when I was in university, I’d fallen into the really insidious thought process that the only way I could make ‘good’ music was if I was pulling from a shitty experience. I’m not the only artist who has fallen into this feeling. I’d say the mentality comes from how we talk about artists of the past and the struggles they had with mental and physical illness — it’s often romanticised, with the narrative being that they made incredible artworks because of their pain — but I think it’s more that they created incredible work in spite of their pain. And they were likely to have made even more good work if they had proper support to work through those circumstances.

But that took me a while to understand, and so before that, I’d feel an insecurity around my artistic identity if I was not, somehow, able to create when I was in pain. In those college days, when I wasn’t particularly having a difficult time, I’d go sit at the piano and try to conjure up a painful experience in order to write some music. I was putting myself in an unhealthy position by doing that. Because at the same time, music was always there for me to process hard moments. So now it’s become about making sure I understand the difference between the two, between which one is healthy and which one isn’t.

When my first record, peace places: kenyan memories came out, I’d joke to myself that it was an outlier in my discography because I’d gotten quite used to making what I’d call “sad music”. But there’s a confidence I got from seeing that I could successfully create a piece of work that was drawing from positive and neutral memories. It made me conscious of my approach to FEELING BODY, a process where I was continually thinking: “how to share a painful story without exploiting my own pain?” The biggest lesson of the album, or perhaps the biggest thing I learned from being sick, was that it was important to listen to my body and mind, to treat them kindly. So that’s where some of the sonic elements like voice note recording or text-to-speech came from…when it was too hard to recount certain ideas or to engage with certain words directly, I explored different, safer ways of communicating what I wanted to say.

Photo by Gianfranco Bello, courtesy the artist

ACL: This brings me back to Seshadri’s work, which depicts water as a substance, as something tangible. I think it’s possible to see in the painting a measure of anxiety, of being trapped in-between, rather than freely flowing. Your work is full of hope, but do you think it’s possible to get caught by that in-betweenness, and stay stuck in that place?

NK: It’s nice to circle back to Serena’s painting. Something that she mentioned was that she worked on the painting “during a particularly bad migraine, and [I] remember the way it felt to layer paint on while in a fight with my own body- dizzy and nauseous but desperate to finish.” I connected to the painting immediately, before even knowing that she was sick while creating the work.

I think blurring the lines between body and water is a lot about the in-between, the idea of constant motion, how being sick means that you don’t quite know what you’ll feel in the next moment. Maybe there is a certain comfort in the in-between, but I don’t entirely know that you can get stuck there. You learn how to go with the flow — and that’s where that idea of listening returns. It becomes a responsive relationship in some way: your body is different, is changing, and at each shift, you work to accept the new place it’s brought you to.

ACL: Would water also be a vehicle for memory?

Oh absolutely. I didn’t like Frozen 2, but that was one theme from that film that I quite liked, ha.

There are of course better places that have explored this idea, especially when I think of African artists like photographer David Ụzọchukwu, who explores the historical and contemporary links between Blackness and water through stunning, fantastical photography; or the South African writer and scholar, Mapule Mohulatsi, who has written about water (particularly the ocean) being a part of the memory of previously enslaved people and their descendants, and in turn, being part of African and Black memory and trauma.

In the album, I wouldn’t say I quite went into water as a vehicle for memory, though. It was more that I reflected on water as solace and as healing, both in my own experience, as well as in Kikuyu and biblical spirituality as well.

ACL: It’s very interesting how the field recordings come from very different places (Kenya, the US). While ill, sometimes I feel like I’m unstuck from the world. Does FEELING BODY place the body somewhere, so to speak?

NK: Perhaps this is an opportunity to call out press outlets who found it difficult to engage with FEELING BODY because they couldn’t “place” it within my being African, especially after peace places: kenyan memories gave an easy way to do that.

I’d say that the album is based in and out of the body. I was really attempting to recreate what the illness felt like, from the literal symptoms being ‘enacted’ by eerie violin or trumpet sounds, to uncanny voices restating the thoughts that would go on in my mind. The focus in this album was not one of place, but of body.

ACL: Thank you so much for your time. Is there anything else you’d like to say to our readers?

NK: I didn’t know what the response would be when I released this record. I was nervous that it would be too challenging and uncomfortable of a topic for people to want to engage with. Truthfully, that is some of the response that I got. But I think we need to properly make space for art that is about things that are hard to hear, and perhaps we need to inquire why it’s hard to really engage with these things together. More people than we realise go about their day-to-day lives with chronic illness or with other kinds of immense pain, and it’s a bit unfortunate that it took me being sick to realise that.

But there’s also been a lot of people who were open with sharing that they felt understood by the record, and honestly that’s all I could ever hope for. In turn, I’d just like to share some of the sick and disabled artists whose work gave me courage while I worked on the music: JJJJJerome Ellis, Molly Joyce, Anna RG — incredible sound-makers who have been pushing for us to consider the ways that we’ve been failing each other when it comes to communal care.