A song about peace from Rwanda
Our #Hamburgsounds project has come to a close after a terrific success, so for our next Cities and Memory stop, let’s go quite a bit further afield – to a village in Rwanda, in fact.
Luke Henrion collected this field recording while visiting a project run by the charity Oxfam, and describes it like this: “A big group of women sang and clapped our arrival. Many of them lost their husbands/siblings in the genocide, half of them are HIV+, we met them as part of a peacebuilding and livestock project.”
The recording was picked up on by Walker Wooding from Houston, Texas, who’s produced the following remix and had this to say about it:
“The clapping in the recording reminded me that the basics of music and language can be achieved on great scales through the simplest of means—our hands, our voices. So, I tried to feature some of the rhythm of the clapping in the remix.
“Also, years ago, I interviewed a former U.S. ambassador to the nation of Burundi. She offered her insight into genocide taking place 20 years ago in neighboring Rwanda. So, working on this recording has engaged me on multiple levels.”
City version:
Memory version:
