“There is a need for a more activated way of listening to our environment, which can lead to greater awareness of what’s around us. Artists can help with this. Works that help us to experience sound deeply, making us aware of our ears and bodies which listen all the time, are more necessary than ever.” Kamaru.
Joesph Kamaru is a Berlin based sound artist. He is an active field recordist and discusses noise and listening through his work. He is interested in stimulating awareness of the environment through creative composition.
“Within the complex sound specter of our environments and surroundings, sounds are always immersive, proximal, and constantly pushing through our bodies. There is a temporal flux with the sounds of our habitus and daily lives, which most often goes unnoticed and ignored.” Kamaru
His work tends to be surrounded by intellectual narratives. The sound is a medium to carry ideas. For example, he uses subtle variations over time in synthesizers to explore duration, time warp and accelerration. The slower movement of this music can be read as a critique of the hyper-accelerated states of our time. How do we live today, and how can we contrast that pace using sound and music? There is the intellectual narrative of the sound as text, but the complexity of feeling and being is beyond the compartmentalization of language. I feel a sense of peace and clarity as I listen. It is a new intricate peace, rested in the beauty we reach through discomfort. A contemporary peace that remains critical and present, and can never be a full peace. It is an evolution of the new age peace that failed to be critical.
Kamaru has to explain his work to the world with a formula of text to access people, institutions and ways of earning a living. He commented he never directed his music. He would sit in his studio and create, to then analyse after. As my process of composition is quite similiar, I wonder are we objective as creators to translate our music into text? Perhaps it is always an estimation. Perhaps the quality of the music is not ours to claim. I have noticed, when I add exciting words to my work people seem more interested and engaged.