https://kamlakbmbo.bandcamp.com/album/nostalgia-remasterd
Memory can be fascinating for the curious. We keep around old photos of events we deem significant, or that capture a feeling we’d like to remember. We apply filters to give our recent photos an impressionistic or timeless sheen.
Despite our best efforts to solidify our version of events, memory remains fluid. Not just because we forget stuff, which we all do, constantly. Trivial: grocery lists, emails we didn’t read, stuff we left under furniture; and significant: life events, health and safety, functional knowledge. I myself am probably among the worst at recording my actual life, and I think it’s because I suspect deep down, my version of events will probably change over time.
Old friends can disagree about the simplest facts about what happened long ago. In my experience, discovering subjective truth has been more life-changing than preserving memories.
But what happens when a new thing, say… music, gives you a feeling of nostalgia, and prompts you to re-examine a forgotten moment? Well, that might be even more interesting.
Listening to this little collection of tracks, I’m struck by how familiar the many various traditions and styles sound to my ears, and yet I wonder that I’ve ever heard anything quite like it. All the same they bring back very real memories.
“Coffee From Ethiopia (ቡና ከኢትዮጵያ)” is a standout, a neon sunset cruise through Addis. The tizita bassline weaves through Juno synths on the cassette player as woodsmoke and coffee drift by. Or did that never happen…?
“Nostalgia (ትዝታ)” is closer to the feeling of what could be described as the claustrophobia of memory, the shadow side of nostalgia, wherein we realize that there are some things that can never be reclaimed, can never be revisited.
This uncanniness is held up with the feeling that it plays as a soundtrack. If we’re watching a movie, it’s a slow motion grainy segment of a band playing in a small obscure venue. Lo-fi samples of hand percussion, background noises, and real sounding spaces contrast with the muffled direct-recorded keys that act as non-diegetic sound. We watch from a distance, and we are offered no illusion of being placed within the scene.
Music has always been a big place, but we only recently have seen how awe-inspiringly massive the world’s music is. Sun Ra streams back to back with Shakira on my home speakers and I love just about every minute of it. The world reverberates with music; it bounces back and forth between genres and across geography, overlapping and changing as it flows. And all this while we go about our lives, listening to the music and creating new memories.