Minimal Collective
Best albums of 2024

KMRU - Temporary Stored II

Following the repatriation of the Sound Archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in 2021, KMRU produced Temporary Stored, an evocative narrative about colonialism and collective memory forged from original material and field recordings taken from the Archive. This year, KMRU enlisted the help of African and diasporic musicians Jessica Ekomane, Lamine Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Bhavisha Panchia to produce a follow-up that is every bit as meaningful. Working with this array of collaborators, KMRU produces a ‘sonic retort’ against the legacy of colonialism and extractivism.

Best of 2024
MUSIC
KMRU, LAMIN FOFANA, JESSICA EKOMANE, NYOKABI KARIŨKI, AND AHO SSAN,
TEMPORARY STORED II (OFNOT)

Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU is a Nairobi-born, Berlin-based sound artist who in 2022 broadened his explorations of institutional recording devices and the mechanical reproduction of acoustic environments with his hauntological piece Temporary Stored, which received an honorary mention from the Prix Ars Electronica 2023 in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category. For his collaborative follow-up Temporary Stored II, KMRU gathered a cohort of sound experimentalists of African origin to further excavate the auditory residue of the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. In listening back to colonial recordings, they find “fragile vessels carrying fragments of practices and embodied knowledges,” as curator Bhavisha Panchia writes in the album’s liner notes.
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Temporary Stored II - Listening Event (After, Berlin, Köpenicker Str 187-188)
13.11.2024

Temporary Stored II
by KMRU, Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Jessica Ekomane, Nyokabi Kariũki, Bhavisha Panchia

Pre Order Vinyl

When KMRU accessed the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, it catalysed an auditory response in the form of the album Temporary Stored. The album listened back to listen forward – to reckon with the collective inheritance of colonial (sound) archives. Temporary Stored II serves as an artistic and curatorial extension of the original album, inviting other artists to lend their critical ear to museum archives holding recordings of African songs, traditions and practices. With KMRU, Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Jessica Ekomane draw upon their listening experiences as global contemporaries navigating a world in flux ecologically, economically, and politically. Each artist brings a selection of sonic fragments out of dormancy, channelling (in)audible traces into a contemporary cultural and political paradigm.

Temporary Stored II sensitively responds to historical archives whose sounds have been restored and made more accessible through digitalisation, despite still being the copyrighted property of European institutions. It develops an emergent language to engage with the vocal, rhythmic and syllabic intelligence rooted in these sonic repertoires, grounded in reimagination of sonic records as seeds for a sounding future. Listening back to these recordings is one way to recover the loss of listening traditions, orality and modes of transmission. In these sonic mediations, Lamin Fofana, KMRU, Jessica Ekomane, Nyokabi Kariũki and Aho Ssan account for the archives with care and criticality.

Inscribed in this album are “black waveforms as rebellious enthusiasms”, which in the words of Katherine McKittrick “affirm, through cognitive schemas, modes of being human that refuse antiblackness while restructuring our existing system of knowledge.” The album asks us to listen to colonial pasts and imagine the sound of our epistemological futures. It is a sonic retort; a playback to history and its colonial processes of extraction and accumulation. Temporary Stored II is a reminder that the labour of listening back is a continuous process of reassessing what has been lost, captured and refused.

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Temporary Stored , PRIX ARS HONORARY MENTION

Archives have always been framed in a guise that promotes a Western perspective of representations of the Other, a modernity in which the institutions and museums frame these archives and collections. These ways of representing the artifacts, tangible or intangible, problematize the mode in which the knowledge or histories of the peoples are communicated. Most African traditions are passed through apprenticeship and other oral traditions, usually put out of context and reconﬁgured in a Eurocentric dimension. Written sources in the West are deemed ontologically concrete and immune to individual distortion, whereas oral sources seem nebulous and subjectively constituted. An ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred in colonies outside Europe, leading to the objectification of artifacts, humans, tools, sounds, and instruments. This harboring of objects in museums and institutions is unethical and problematic as the so-called ‘objects’ are not considered objects in Africa. They are historical carriers, spiritual beings, and cultural entities passed on from generation to generation, and they reflect past and future histories. However, these histories are not accessible to those who now own them and who have created their own imagined version of past histories. The occident has accumulated most of these archives and continuously reproduces a colonial pattern in this discourse. 

Temporary Stored  is a repatriation project which questions the significance of sound archives in museums. Using selected sounds from an archive from the Sound Archive of Royal Museum of Central Africa, a fixed media piece is developed, re-contextualizing what the archived sounds reveal about the cultural heritage of countries in East and Central Africa. The piece focuses on narratives through different sounds from the archive, field recordings, and synthesizers, reconfiguring ways of thinking sonically through recorded pasts and futures.

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Jury Statement:

Temporary Stored is an important outcry and in what better medium than within sound? The Great Star of Africa diamond, the world’s largest diamond, was stolen) in South Africa in 1905. Most recently, May 2023, the diamond, set in the Sovereign’s Sceptre, was pompously paraded around during the coronation of King Charles III. The normalization of the admiration and consumption of stolen) artefacts from former colonies is a deeply recurrent European issue. Temporary Stored is nonetheless not a rehashing of European colonial violence—this piece rather uses sound as a conjuring of specters of oral and cultural histories of Central and Eastern Africa. Its haunting sounds are reminiscent of old orientalist views of an ‘other’ as an evil, whilst at the same time carrying a stark ironic contrast that sounds are in fact manifestations of ever living sources of knowledge. This sculpture is not an object for European consumption. It is a deeply political task of excavation—this time being carried out by those to whom this (hi)story rightfully belongs.

PALMA ARS ACUSTICA
Honorary Mention

The Jury also gave a special mention to Temporary Stored by Joseph Kamaru, entered by DKU. They wanted to pay special tribute to the value of Kamaru’s approach as a sound artist, calling into question our European-centric position in the field of sound. They were impressed by the way Kamaru had captured the essence of the archive.

Hörspielhör!spiel!art.mix: Palma ars acustica Special Mention 2023

Freitag, 23-2-2024
9:05 PM to 10:30 PM

BAYERN 2

Palma ars acustica Special Mention 2023
Temporary Stored
Von Joseph Kamaru
Autorenproduktion 2024

Klang als Raubkunst. Die Restitution von geraubten Kunstobjekten sorgt für heiße Debatten in der europäischen Museumslandschaft. Ebenso drängend ist aber die Frage nach dem Umgang mit immateriellem Erbe. Für den Klangkünstler Joseph Kamaru spielen Sounds dabei eine zentrale Rolle: Von Generation zu Generation weitergegeben, stellen sie eine Verbindung her zwischen Vergangenheit und Zukunft. In "Temporary Stored" hinterfragt Kamaru die Bedeutung von Klangarchiven für die Geschichte kolonialer Gewalt. Mit Synthesizer-Klängen, Field Recordings und Aufnahmen aus dem Archiv des Königlichen Museums für Zentralafrika in Tervuren arbeitet er an der Wiederaneignung der geraubten Sounds.

Temporary Stored

Not only masks and sculptures were stolen from Africa during the colonial period. Sounds also did not find their way into European museums without
being forced. Joseph Kamaru explores the audio archive of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium.

Temporary Stored]
2021/2022
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An ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred in colonies outside Europe leading to the objectification of artifacts, humans, tools, sounds, instruments amongst other materials. This harboring of the objects in museums and institutions is unethical and problematic as the so-called objects’ are not regarded as objects in an African context. These are historical carriers, spiritual beings, and cultural entities that have been passed
over generations and are meant to be learned from and act as reflections of past and future histories. Although these histories are not accessible to whom they belong to and impetus imagined histories of the past. The occident has accumulated most of these archives and continuously reproduces a
colonial pattern in this discourse. Considering suppositions proposed by Bonaventur Ndikung, and Kofi Agawu on the archive, [Temporary Stored] questions and reflects on the significance of these sounds, objects, and instruments stored in ethnological museums. These museums and institutions have acquired objects through dubious conditions such as looting, theft, greed, and naivety of sellers, in the spirit of predator capitalism outside former colonies of Europe, eradicating histories, norms, and practices of these communities and countries. Additionally, with the fact that most of the archives
have been contextualized from a European bias and an institutional ordering of knowledge, the presentation, descriptions of the sounds and objects often lose the relationship with their/ its inhabitants as the focus has been put primarily on the object and sound’ materialities leaving other significances of the archives. Temporary Stored] focuses on a narrative throughout different sounds from the Sound Archive of Royal Museum of Central Africa repatriated in 2021 and reconfigured in an emancipatory sonic hearing of the archive through a radiophonic sounds piece.

^{source of recordings: DEKKMMA /

Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA)}

-The restitution of stolen art objects is causing heated debates in the European museum landscape. However, the question of how to deal with immaterial heritage is just as pressing. For the sound artist Joseph Kamaru, sounds play a central role: Passed down from generation to generation, they create a connection between the past and the future.

In Temporary Stored Kamaru questions the importance of sound archives for the history of colonial violence. Using synthesizer sounds, field recordings and recordings from the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, he is working on re-appropriating the stolen sounds.-

- Special thanks to: _{Rémy Jadinon, Derek Debru, Daisuke Ishida, Jessica Ekomane, Marcus Gamme, UDK SoundS ,

Royal Museum for Central Africa , DEKKMMA, Deutschlandfunk Kultur. The Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research (CAD+SR).}

Temporary Stored - Limited Edition Cassette

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There is alot of talk today aboubt the return of the innumerable works of art in Western Museums - particularly those in museums of primitive arts - to their countries of origin. African countries in particular claim as an integral part of their own cultural heritage the statues and other artefacts that have been taken from their natural surroundings, often by force and in the context of colonial violence. And yet this legitimate claim only applies to tangible heritage. It does not apply to the intangible heritage, by its nature, could not be looted, extorted, exported for exhibition in metropolitan museums, or integrated into the supposedly inalienable heritage of the colonial powers.

paulin J Hountondji

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press
FIRST FLOOR 135#

KMRU “MR2” (Self-released)

The fate of physical artifacts taken from colonized lands and peoples has been the source of endless debate, but what about immaterial artifacts? On Temporary Stored, a new work KMRU is currently offering as a name-your-price release on Bandcamp, the Kenyan producer openly ponders that question, pulling from the sound archive of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium to create meditative gems like “MR2.” A stirringly tense composition, it blends digital dirge with snippets of dramatic vocalizations and what sounds like the incessant scraping of a shovel plunging into the earth, unearthing (a frankly ugly) history in the process.

Field Notes
Releases of the month July

Joseph Kamaru or KMRU, who is also represented on "Sounds of Absence" with one piece, on the other hand, uses the album "Temporary Stored" for critical intervention regarding appropriation, archiving and museumization, is also called commodification, the artifacts of earlier colonies by institutions of the global north. For this purpose, he works with the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa and understands the sounds used as connecting lines between different generations or the past and the future. Thus, the six individual pieces as well as the 50-minute radiophonic pieces represent equally actively practiced historical criticism as they themselves question the conditions of historiography as such.

Shfl

KMRU’s reconception of what found-sound creations and exploratory music could convey continued on one of his most striking and passionate releases, 2022’s Temporary Stored. Conceived as a extension of the continuing cause of reclaiming art and archival holdings back to Africa from western museums, Temporary Stored is split between six shorter pieces and a nearly hour-long one, with KMRU combining performances on newly repatriated instruments, speech and discussion samples and deep synthesizer work to create an involving call to action.

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Joseph Kamaru
Stored? (2022) - wip
safes, tapes, prints, keys

Talk:
CTM 2023: The Time for Denial Is Over

Photos by : Frankie Casillo / CTM Festival 2023

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URGENT PEDAGOGIES
Temporary Stored (2023)

Joseph Kamaru aka KMRU questions the colonial archive upon which European/Occidental thinking, schooling, and listening rely. Kamaru’s project, Temporary Stored, liberates the sonic beings of ancestors.

In his research, he situates listening practices, and in turn, the production of sound, as having the potential to revitalize subjectivities, against the objectification and racialization enacted by sonic colonialities. Kamaru’s liberation of sounds from the colonial archive includes first, accessing them, which is no small feat given their institutional enclosure; then, a close listening to them; and finally, re-mixing them with field recordings and synthesizers. This re-encantation honors his, and our collective, ancestralities.

KMRU “MR2” (OFNOT)

Aho Ssan “They Heard Us” (OFNOT)

In a time when it’s become trendy for museums to tout their efforts to “decolonize” themselves, it’s often unclear what exactly that means, especially when so many of their collections are still full of artifacts acquired via colonial plunder. There’s no clear blueprint for how to move forward, and while the answer is sometimes as simple as “give the objects back,” what’s the correct course of action with collections that extend beyond physical objects? The Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium has a massive sound archive, and in 2021, that archive was opened to Kenyan sound artist KMRU, who used the museum’s collection as the building blocks for his 2022 album Temporary Stored.

Now he’s returned with Temporary Stored II, a sequel on which his latest compositions are joined by works from Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariũki and Jessica Ekomane. All the the artists were given access to the museum’s archives, and, like KMRU, all of them have direct ties to colonized peoples and places, which makes for an emotionally weighty release. KMRU himself provides more than half of the tracks, of which “MR2” is the most riveting, layering moody textures atop field recordings of African singing and what sounds like the steady thumps, dings and scrapes of physical labor. Listening, one can only imagine the (likely horrifying) conditions under which that labor took place, but KMRU sits in that discomfort, amplifying the recorded workers’ struggle—and their resilience.