Review of Mombasa — Revista Musical Chilena

Review of Mombasa
Eleonora Coloma Casaula
Revista Musical Chilena, Vol. 76, No. 238, pp. 175–177, December 2022

Mombasa. Felipe Otondo. Darren Wood and Erdem Helvacioğlu (Mastering). [Downloadable EP]. British label Sargasso. SCD28085D. 2022.

“Hearing does not give us presence, it does not give us any figure of the sonic, it does not place anything before us, but rather refers us to the distant sound… In the presence of sound, I am given the absence of the thing” (Rivera 2007: 96). When listening to the album Mombasa by academic, researcher and composer Dr Felipe Otondo, these words by Chilean philosopher Jorge Eduardo Rivera came to mind, since this work brings to our ears a sonic world that places us somewhere between the absence suggested by music and the presence of a distant landscape that we can almost traverse to the rhythm of our footsteps.

Through this sensory interplay, we hear what seems to be the surf of a coastline which, close to the bustle of a city, blends with songs, voices and rhythms, accompanied by suggestions of electronic timbres that subtly merge with the sculpted character of archival recordings. Through the three compositions that make up this album—Sauti, Hare Krishna Remix and Mombasa Mix—we thus embark on a journey in which, through contrasting sounds, rhythms unfolding at different speeds, and dynamics that seem to move closer and farther away—sometimes abruptly—we travel through a land that feels remote from the listening perspective of an insular Chile.

The description of the album on the website of the British label Sargasso, which released the work, states that its three tracks were inspired by the iconic album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) by Brian Eno and David Byrne, which incorporated sampled voices, found sounds, and African and Middle Eastern rhythms. It further explains that the pieces took as their starting point field recordings made in Mombasa, on the east coast of Kenya, during Ramadan in 2012.

By combining and transforming audio samples from interviews, radio broadcasts and soundscapes with textures generated using different synthesis techniques, Otondo explores various aspects of contemporary African culture, bringing together his research in engineering and his development as an artistic creator. In the author’s words: “…as a researcher and artist, this work is important because it allows me to consolidate the creative work I have developed over the past fifteen years.”

It is also worth noting that two of the album’s pieces received international recognition. Sauti was performed live by the composer at the University of Limerick Concert Hall in Ireland and was a finalist in the Musica Nova competition in the Czech Republic. Mombasa Mix received first prize in the electronic music category of the international Computer Space Art Forum competition, held in Sofia, Bulgaria, since 1991.

Both distinctions make a significant contribution to the dissemination and visibility of Chilean musical creation and contribute meaningfully to the decentralisation of the arts, since this work was produced at the Art and Technology Laboratory of Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivia, Los Ríos Region, and was partially funded by Chile’s Ministry of Cultures, Arts and Heritage.

Levinas states that “the most elementary procedure of art consists in substituting the image for the object.” Here, we witness a journey through blocks of sound that appear and disappear, approach and recede, combined with sounds that evoke the sense of drifting through unfamiliar streets. We are tourists in what we hear. During the listening experience, we encounter recognisable events that are presented in a new way through music.

In Sauti, we become subjects of a contrasting rhythmic drift. We recognise the sounds as electronic, yet their forms continually integrate and disintegrate in ways that make us forget their artificial origin and connect us with the landscape, shifting the experience towards the act of listening to the human.

Then, in Hare Krishna Remix, through a finely crafted process of editing sonic materials, we find ourselves in the midst of a procession, with various forms of collective musical expression passing beside us in what seems like a carnival. They approach until we are enveloped in their presence, as though the image were, at times, truly the object it represents. Rivera writes: “Every work of art is a reality that consists precisely in opening up something that transcends that very reality.”

In this case, the fieldwork undertaken in Kenya in 2012 opens up before us as a materiality that projects the author’s point of view, our own point of view, and that of the collected archive towards a new reality recreated with every listening, revealing details that had previously gone unnoticed. The sonic fabric, which at first seems transparent, gradually reveals itself as a complex texture, at times creating the image of a place that we will never entirely come to know.

Finally, Mombasa Mix, as the album’s conclusion, brings these two perspectives together. Electronic sound transformed into landscape combines with voices whose languages, rhythms and timbres contrast with one another, creating a texture poised somewhere between archival material and musical structuring.

One moment in this piece is particularly striking: after approximately three and a half minutes, we seem to hear silence—or rather, that suggestion of silence so characteristic of leaving behind a noisy environment. As in everyday life, once we experience the peaceful sensation of the surrounding sound disappearing, we begin to hear those almost imperceptible sounds again, much like stepping away from deafening noise into a quiet side street whose sonic character we discover with curiosity.

The album as a whole invites us to experience music, sound and the complex range of perspectives that emerge when we observe another culture. In a telescopic way, it offers a snapshot of a moment which, although fictional in its aesthetic outcome, allows us to touch what seems to be, at least, the reality perceived by the person who collected its materials and composed them into the musical work presented to us.

Eleonora Coloma Casaula
Faculty of Arts, Universidad de Chile, Chile