Pitchfork 乐评翻译｜Natur - KMRU
By Will Lynch
流派：电子 / 实验
厂牌：Touch
Reviewed：July 30, 2024
The Kenyan artist’s new release is a stunning portrait of the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises of his hometown. In its swelling electrical currents lies a thesis about the richness and drama of everyday sounds
这位肯尼亚音乐人的新作是一幅令人惊叹的画卷，捕捉了他家乡的电磁声音和隐藏的噪音。在这些汹涌澎湃的电流中，展现了一篇关于日常声音丰富性和戏剧性的深刻论述。
Every city has its own sound—literally. Beyond whatever music might get played there, every place on earth emits a set of frequencies that is completely unique. For Joseph Kamaru, these identities are as distinct as skylines. “Soundscapes reveal a lot about how people think and behave,” he recently told Resident Advisor. He notices them when he goes somewhere new and explores them in his music. Often, they make him think of his home city, Nairobi.
每个城市都有其独特的声音。除了播放的音乐之外，地球上的每个地方都发出一组完全独特的频率。对于 Joseph Kamaru 来说，这些特征如同城市的天际线一样独特。他最近在接受 Resident Advisor 采访时表示：“音景揭示了很多关于人们如何思考和行为的内容。”他在去新的地方时会注意到这些声音，并在他的音乐中探索它们。它们常常让他想到他的家乡，内罗毕。
Kamaru moved to Berlin in 2020. Since then, he’s recorded over a dozen records that position him as a master of esoteric sound: a blend of ambient, drone, noise, and field recordings, defined by tactile sound design and an emotional palette that runs from haunting to serene. In 2022, he composed what would become As Nature, a live show inspired, as he put it in an email, by “the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises in Nairobi that are so present that the inhabitants of the city become connected with them.” He played it again and again at experimental events across Europe, tweaking it until he formed an intense bond with the music. “I became it,” he says.
Kamaru 于 2020 年搬到柏林。自那时起，他录制了十几张专辑，将自己定位为神秘声音的大师，这些专辑融合了氛围音乐、嗡鸣、噪音和田野录音，其特点是有触感的声音设计和从令人难忘到宁静的情绪化的调色。2022 年，他创作了后来成为《As Nature》的作品，这是一个现场表演节目。他在一封电子邮件中表示，这个节目受到了“内罗毕的电磁声音和隐藏的噪音的启发，这些声音如此存在，以至于城市的居民与之产生了联系”。他在欧洲各地的实验活动中反复演奏这部作品，不断调整，直到他与音乐形成了紧密的联系。他说，“我成了它的一部分”。
Natur, which arrives on the UK label Touch, is the album version of that performance. In its attempt to capture ineffable qualities of his home city, it is also a personal record. It is, like much of Kamaru’s music, subtly political as well, shifting the focus to an East African city in an art form dominated by Western bias. More than anything, though, it shows his unique way of hearing the world around him in extraordinary detail, and shaping those impressions into a surreal musical work.
《Natur》在英国厂牌 Touch 发行，是 Kamaru 那次表演的专辑版本。它试图捕捉他家乡那种难以言喻的特质，同时也是一张个人专辑。正如 Kamaru 的大部分音乐一样，这张专辑也带有微妙的政治性，在一种被西方偏见主导的艺术形式中，将焦点转移到了东非城市。然而，更重要的是，它展示了 Kamaru 独特的听觉方式，以非凡的细节感知周围的世界，并将这些印象塑造成超现实的音乐作品。
A single, 52-minute piece, Natur bobs and weaves through crackling noise and balmy ambience. For Kamaru, the sound of Nairobi at night is all about electricity, from the hiss of open transformers to electrosmog—sounds inaudible to the naked ear but captured by Kamaru’s electromagnetic microphones—all set against a darkness deep enough to be broken by low-lit iPhone screens. In its calmer sections, Natur serves up whispers, birdsong, footfalls and muffled crowds, humid drones and barely-there melodic loops. In its more chaotic sections, frequencies wail, whoosh, and crash. Above all, they buzz. At times the album feels like a gallery of the countless distinct forms electrical buzzing can take.
《Natur》是一首长达 52 分钟的单曲，穿梭于噼啪作响的噪音和温暖的环境音之间。对于 Kamaru 来说，内罗毕夜晚的声音全是关于电的，从打开的变压器的嘶嘶声到电磁辐射——这些声音对于裸耳来说是听不见的，但通过Kamaru的电磁麦克风捕捉到了它们——所有这些都在 iPhone 屏幕所发出的微弱光亮就能够打破的深邃黑暗中展现出来。在较为平静的部分，《Natur》呈现出耳语、鸟鸣、脚步声、低语的人群、潮湿的嗡鸣声和几乎不可察觉的旋律循环。在较为混乱的部分，频率哀嚎、呼啸、碰撞。但最引人注目的是，它们都在嗡嗡作响。有时，这张专辑感觉像是展示了电嗡声的无数独特形式的画廊。
Ambient as much of it is, the result is the opposite of background music. Natur is a voltaic odyssey, a ghost train rumbling, twisting and floating through this aural rendering of Nairobi at night. Kamaru has written about what he calls “activated listening,” a closely intentional form of listening that Natur demands of its listeners from its opening section, a swelling wave of electrical currents that crests just before it short-circuits. Perhaps because it took shape as a live performance, this is a dynamic, ever-evolving composition, one that moves through a sequence of scenes as distinct as they are abstract.
尽管《Natur》的大部分内容是氛围音乐，但它的效果与背景音乐相反。它是一场电能的奥德赛，如同一列幽灵火车，在对内罗毕夜晚的听觉呈现中隆隆作响、扭曲和漂浮。Kamaru 曾写过他所谓的“激活聆听”，这是一种高度有意图的聆听方式，而《Natur》从其开篇部分起就要求听众进行这种聆听，开篇部分是一波电流的涨潮，在短路前达到高潮。也许因为这部作品最初是作为现场表演而成型的，它是一部动态、不断演变的作品，通过一系列既独特又抽象的场景不断移动。
Take the passage about 15 minutes in, when a barrage of white-hot frequencies mercifully gives way to a haze of soothing, natural sounds. Kamaru follows this pattern for much of the record’s first half, swerving through a thicket of noise, then slipping, at just the right moment, into a stretch of relative serenity. After a while, the two modes blur together into something droning and hypnotic.
在大约 15 分钟时，一阵炽热的频率突袭终于让位于一片舒缓的自然声音的迷雾。Kamaru 在专辑的前半部分大多遵循这一模式，穿梭于噪音的丛林中，然后在恰到好处的时刻滑入一段相对宁静的片段。随着时间的推移，这两种模式逐渐融合成一种持续不断、如同催眠般的音景。
Every moment along this drifting path is bursting with vivid detail. Layered together or presented in turn, Kamaru’s sounds are carefully sculpted and lovingly displayed, artifacts of the invisible world his work explores. It’s usually hard to tell field recordings—presented as-is or embellished in the studio—apart from sounds entirely of his creation. Still, the record demonstrates something Kamaru senses more easily than the rest of us, which is the richness and drama of everyday sounds. Natur helps us hear what he hears.
这条漂泊的道路上的每一刻都充满了生动的细节。无论是层层叠加还是依次呈现，Kamaru的声音都被精心雕琢并充满爱意地展示，成为他探索的无形世界的产物。这些声音通常很难区分是原样呈现的现场录音，还是在录音室中润色过的声音，抑或是他完全自创的声音。然而，这张专辑展示了 Kamaru 比我们更容易感知的东西：日常声音的丰富性和戏剧性。《Natur》帮助我们听到了他所听到的东西。
