KMRU - Natur

A Closer Listen

Which city is louder: Nairobi or Berlin?  The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is Nairobi.  A relocation from one city to the other inspired KMRU to start thinking about the differences in his environments, such as the difference between wearing shoes and going shoeless, or the wide night sky over one location obscured by light pollution in the next.  Crucially for a recording artist, the two homes sounded different.  On Natur he seeks to capture the contrasts of dueling biophanies.

As the Touch imprint writes, Natur is “KMRU’s most uncompromising work to date.”  It’s certainly denser and more abrasive than the artist’s ambient works, although the single, fifty-two-minute track possesses segments of intense beauty and interiority.  Listeners will be hard-pressed to estimate which sources stem from which location, as the composition also includes electromagnetic frequencies and amplified technologies, often hidden even from those who use them.  The entire piece becomes a treatise on the natural and the unnatural, and the compromises one makes in order to enjoy the trappings of “modernity.”  When one has lived in multiple places, which noises sound the most like home?

As the piece begins, one hears creeping electronic tones, the 21st century already in motion, relentless and unstoppable.  Wires crisscross cities, bearing messages, power, connection.  One does not normally hear external drone apart from feedback, a sound quickly quenched should it appear in one’s household.  Yet one may also grow acclimated to such sounds, as most have done with their screens.  KMRU’s gift is to make such sounds musical, so that when they grow in volume and insistence, they become alluring rather than distracting.  One leans in to hear more; and just then, the sounds recess to reveal a bank of field recordings that may have been there all along.

The mind recalibrates, asking the old questions about paradise and parking lots.  Do we miss the sounds of nature (natur?), and what they represent?  Is the loss of visible stars a small price to pay? And on the other hand, how much is too much?  In some cities, non-stop construction guarantees that no day, short of a nuclear pulse, will sound placid.  Midway through the piece, flocks of birds become audible for the first time.  Will anyone feel nostalgia for the sound of birds in the wild, or have they become so integrated into the urban landscape that one forgets their global diversity? Some of their calls even sound electronic, a reminder that some species mimc even the sound of our phones.  A child cries in the electronic wilderness, seemingly unattended.  Or is it a saw?

By the time the composition edges into a slow, steady drone, it imitates the hum of a city ~ indeed all cities.  A mourning dove attempts to break through the drone and fails.  Would we rather have mourning doves or streaming services?  The answer is obvious.  Natur offers the sound of the new nature: the aggregate of sounds humans now consider natural, no matter what their source.  If the piece sounds lulling rather than unsettling, the damage may already be done.  (Richard Allen)