John Wynne
Upcountry
by John Wynne
Investigating ways of moving back and forth between a kind of documentary and abstraction, the piece moved beyond conventional notions of portraiture and became as much about the place and my memory of it as about Ingosi himself. In the gap between my experience and the way it is communicated through the soundwork, I sought compositional methods that would express the subjectivity of my perspective without betraying the context from which the sounds arose.
(John Wynne in his paper, Hearing Voices, Seeing Faces:Sound art and disappearing languages in the McWorld, forthcoming in 3rd Text)
John Wynne Programme note:
Upcountry began as the second in a series of 'sonic portraits' of Kenyans I have met during my travels in their country. The subject is William Ingosi Mwoshi, a master musician of the Luhyia community from the region just north of Lake Victoria. 'Upcountry' is the term used by people in Nairobi to refer to other parts of Kenya: to 'go upcountry' is to leave Nairobi, often carrying the implication of 'going home'. The sound sources for this piece are derived exclusively from recordings of Ingosi I made while visiting his home in the remote village of Kamulembe and walking with him around the vicinity and in Kakamega rainforest. This forest is where Luhyia musicians and instrument makers traditionally obtained the raw materials for their instruments and was a rich source of raw materials for my piece. These sonic sources have been manipulated via computer to create a piece which moves from documentary to rhythmic abstraction - and back - to reflect the essentially social aspects of Ingosi's life and work and to draw on the rhythmic complexity of his music and his environment, but very much filtered through my own compositional outlook and methods.
John Wynne biography:
Sound artist John Wynne’s work moves in several directions. He is engaged in a series of ‘sonic portraits’ based on recordings made in Africa: the first of these, James Kamotho Kimani, was selected for the ISCM World Music Days in Copenhagen and released by Unknown Public in London. The second piece, Upcountry, premiered in the Purcell Room in London and at the AGON Festival in Milan and has been widely broadcast, most recently on Radiotopia Kunstradio as part of Ars Electronica in Vienna.
A recent research and recording trip to the Kalahari Desert has provided materials for new body of work including Hearing Voices, a 'composed documentary' commissioned by BBC Radio 3 – “a capricious sound world where aural objects shift and surprise” (Resonance Magazine). Disappearing, an acousmatic work composed from the same materials, is to be released by ElectroShock Records in Moscow. An 8-channel photographic sound installation, also entitled Hearing Voices, will be exhibited in 2005 at The National Art Gallery of Namibia, The National Museum of Botswana and the Brunei Gallery at SOAS in London. In Botswana, John worked with linguist Dr Andy Chebanne and his field recordings have been donated to the University of Botswana to aid in research and literacy projects with some of the disappearing 'click languages' of the Khoisan peoples.
Wynne also creates large-scale multi-speaker installations using electronic sounds of his own design. His first work with ‘auditory warnings’ (alarm sounds) was made for The Sound Gallery, a computer diffusion system with 25 speakers hidden under the paving stones of Copenhagen’s Town Hall Square: The Sound of Sirens was banned by the city authorities for allegedly “frightening and confusing people”. Cry Wolf involved a huge installation of 25 computer-controlled speakers installed in a vertical grid against the 4-storey central wall of Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Response Time, which used 8 speakers in a circle surrounding the urban park in Metro Hall Square in Toronto, was described by one reviewer as “an ambient, ghost-like presence”. (MusicWorks)
His most recent installation was in Berlin: Fallender ton für 207 lautsprecher boxen made use of 207 recycled hi-fi speakers and sounded, according to one entry in the gallery visitors’ book, “…like Heaven… and Hell.”
John has created soundtracks for films selected for the London Film Festival, the BBC Short Film Festival, the Whitechapel Open and the European Media Art Festival. He is currently Senior Lecturer in Sound Arts at the University of the Arts, London and is doing his PhD at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has a regular programme called Upcountry on ResonanceFM in London.
Mzee William Ingosi Mwoshi biography (the subject of John Wynne’s aural portrait), written by Dr John McAllister:
Mzee William Ingosi Mwoshi was born in 1939 in Tiriki, Western Kenya. He has been composing and performing his unique style of contemporary sukuti story-songs for more than forty years and has become one of Kenya's best-known neo-traditional musicians and songwriters, despite the fact that most of his songs are in the Luhyia language rather than the more widespread Kiswahili. His most popular number, Mwana wa mberi ni shikhoyalo ("The first-born is an apron"), is almost an unofficial national anthem. No wedding, christening, circumcision or football match is complete without this classic song of homely celebration. Sukuti: a music of dialogue, competition, displacement. Between voice and fiddle. Hand and foot. Song and story. Tradition and change. And, in "natural settings" (like a village drinking party), between artist and audience - trading quips, capping verses, egging each other on. Punctuated by variations and extensions on a single, droning, pibroch-like signature motive, long, discursive songs broadcast the news, praise the singer's friends or ridicule his enemies, reminisce, play with proverbs and fables, and continuously renegotiate the troubled relationship between tradition and modernity. Like the shiriri, his one-stringed fiddle, Ingosi's songs have their roots in the Kakamega rainforest, the Tiriki people's traditional source of livelihood. But the forest is shrinking and the songs - sententious, realistic, uneasy, nostalgic - reflect both the old life of the forest village and the tough realities of a post-colonial state coming apart at the seams.
