It’s been a relatively “quiet” year from the SON team, but that has mostly been due to the whirlwinds of personal projects and commitments that have been the common theme of everyone’s 2023 thus far. Still, we’ve managed to finish and are about to present the tidings from our main endeavour of the past 12 months or so, the recordings and testimonies from the election campaign period of 2022, or Sound Pressure Levels as we called it, coming soon to the archive and this blog.

It has not been all silent however – there was the Sound Art exhibition that we helped organize and that took place on March 10th – 19th at The Mall, Westlands, featuring SON’s own Sophia Bauer alongside the artists Kevo Stero, KMRU and Manjahi Njoroge. In this piece, Sophia looks back at the experience of finally realizing a long-held idea, restating the team’s desire to explore and develop the learning and practice of art and knowledge-building using the medium of sound.

SOPHIA REFLECTS ON THE MARCH 2023 SOUND ART EXHIBITION

I had been thinking about an exhibition of sound art in Nairobi for a few years. Firstly I wanted to show my installation Forest Scapes in Nairobi and secondly I wanted to show it along with other works from Nairobian artists, to shine a light onto this emerging scene. As early as 2019 I started reaching out to fellow artists to ask if they would be interested, and already then The Mall seemed a perfect place for that – I had noticed a few unused spaces that struck me as perfect locations for sound-based works as they would not interfere with each other, being in different rooms, yet could be experienced together in one space – just what we needed. And so I started conversations with the management of The Mall. But then Covid-19 happened and for the next two or three years my focus and that of the world shifted. The idea remained in my head though.

In 2023, at last, I managed to get some funding to bring the installation to Nairobi, from the German organization IFA – Institut Für Auslandsbeziehungen (Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations), a possibly worthwhile link for readers/artists who may want to exhibit in Germany or collaborate with German artists. Luckily, fellow artists Kevo Stero and KMRU, with whom I’d spoken all those years ago, where still on board and were to be joined by Manjahi Njoroge. I reached out again to the management of The Mall and was happy to find that the spaces I had seen earlier were still available.

The four spaces were easily apportioned: Kevo Stero’s installation Obange inhabited a former liquor store on the ground floor of the building. In this work he explores the character of the Obange, a joker, clown, crazy person in the community, and asks: in certain situations, might anyone of us be not be the Obange? He uses the medium of radio to discuss this character, taking a mobile recording studio and micro-broadcast station to different parts of the city in search of so many Obanges-among-us. In his installation you could hear the different voices from past recordings/broadcasts as well as tune in to the ongoing live radio show – the signal could be received anywhere in the station’s vicinity.

What struck me on my first trip to Nairobi was the sudden silence when night fell. As if a switch had been flipped, all of a sudden it goes dark and the noisy hustle and bustle of life abruptly falls silent. In my home city Berlin, especially in the summer, the sunset stretches on for hours. People sit not only in cafes and restaurants, but fill public spaces, parks and street corners, talking, drinking, making and listening to music.
One evening in Berlin, I met the Nairobian artist Sam Hopkins. Our mutual friend, artist Alex Nikolic, introduced us. 
The two were planning “It’s a pity we only exist in the future” (1), an exhibition at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi. That was in 2009. Although I had been around as an electronic musician and DJ, the African continent was unknown to me. I decided to travel to this exhibition opening and offered myself as a DJ. The Goethe-Institut agreed and supported my flight ticket.

On that trip I got to know the hip hop collective Ukoo Flani, Just a Band, the artist group Maasai Mbili and numerous artists, MCs and musicians. I knew nothing about the music and its scene in Kenya; conversely, the local musicians were unfamiliar with Berlin’s electronic music and the club culture. We got excited and became curious to hear what kind of music these different backgrounds and experiences could produce together. This trip was the starting point for BLNRB (Berlin – Nairobi), the first international music project that my brother Hannes and I co-initiated with the Goethe-Institut.
We invited musicians from both cities to make music together, to give concerts and to make recordings. BLNRB also showed us on many levels how music, social context and its possibilities are interconnected. 
Some examples: To try out how that collaboration could sound like, a local studio was rented for two days. We packed a bunch of drum machines and synths and got excited to jam, just to find ourselves stuck in the daily traffic jams in Nairobi. When we arrived at the studio, we were already exhausted.
The high hourly costs of the recording studio then limited our possibilities to make music. Under the pressure of a ticking clock, it was impossible to get deeper into a musical process together. 

We quickly realized that a local recording studio was hardly suitable to create a viable working framework. So for the main part of the project, we decided to rent a house. We found a place in Westlands and set up a temporary studio and living space for the musicians involved. Living and working together over three weeks was a productive challenge. It made the differences in the ideas and needs of daily togetherness apparent. All participants had to confront themselves and ask themselves what they took for granted. The outcome, the collective album with its music and the title “Welcome To The Madhouse” is a reflection on this experiences. It was then released on Out|here Records (2).

We organized an opening concert at the Goethe-Institut. A main aspect was to allow open access for everyone interested. Therefore, admission was free. For an audience from districts such as Kibera or Mathare, it was nevertheless almost impossible to come to the event. The journey home could be organized for participating artists from Kibera, but an audience was thereby excluded. Despite our inclusive intentions we had created an exclusionary space. 

Later on we were able to organize a joint open air concert in Kibera together with the Maasai Mbili Art Center (3). We could use the bus of the Goethe-Institut and bring their soundsystem with us. Musicians of the BLNRB project played and we opened the microphones for spontaneous contributions. 
Robo and Little King, two 12 year old kids, impressed us so much that we invited them to the studio the next day. The party in Kibera for me is one of the best memories of the BLNRB project.
I realized that mobility is a privilege that also shapes the possibilities and circumstances under which music can be produced and experienced. This became even more apparent when it came to organizing a return match in Berlin: While the Berlin artists could get the visa for Kenya “on arrival” at the Nairobi airport, the visa process for the Kenyan artists to enter Germany was complicated. Without institutional support it would have been impossible to get visas for the Kenyan participants and also the financing of such undertakings would hardly have been possible


BLNRB has motivated us to initiate similar projects in Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Mexico, among others, in which the initial experiences of BLNRB are always incorporated. 
But it has also motivated me to look more intensively at the connections between social spaces and power structures, and at the way they affect making music together and the music itself. 
In a late interview, composer John Cage talks about street noises outside his window on 6th Avenue in New York. He likes to listen to the traffic because it doesn’t want to tell him anything about relationships, ideas or feelings and adds: “If you listen to Beethoven or Mozart it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic it’s always different” (4).
Traffic does not say so much about the ideas and feelings of an individual composer, but I believe that the sounds of the city, whether loud or silent, say a very lot about relationships.
The French sociologist and political scientist Henri Lefebvre observes, describes and analyzes the rhythms of urban spaces as organisms and movements of bodies, groups, classes and social structures (5).
These structures are reflected in the sounds of a city, but you can also hear them in music.
I understand music as a product and an exploration of these boundaries. This is reflected in the individual ways of making music, in the way of playing together, of performing, experiencing, but also of distributing and the accessibility of recorded music. The context is always part of the music. That‘s why I also don’t think Beethoven and Mozart sound always the same: Who makes or has the possibilities to make music, where, how with whom, for me are part of music. What we hear, what we don’t hear, reflects social interaction and power structures embedded in the sound; it marks accesses, exclusions, and ways to deal with them. What we listen to shows exactly that. But what we hear on the other hand shows a lot about ourselves and our conditioning of the ways we are listening.
Thus my impression of Nairobi described at the beginning of the text did not represent the whole city at all, but the center around Chester House/ Koinange Street, where I lived. 
But it shaped my thoughts about Nairobi’s differences to Berlin at first.
In contrast, Kibera was very lively after sunset. But I didn’t notice that until later. I was privileged to be able to move around.





(1) http://www.samhopkins.org/its-a-pity-we-only-exist-in-the-future.html
(2) https://outhererecords.bandcamp.com/album/blnrb-welcome-to-the-madhouse
(3) https://www.instagram.com/maasai_mbili/?hl=de
(4) Sebestik, Miroslav (Regie), Grange Anne, Sebestik Miroslav (Buch): Écoute, Paris, 1992, Centre Georges Pompidou, JBA Production, La Sept, Mikros Image, Sacem
(5) Lefebvre Henri: Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, Paris, Bloomsbury Academic, New York 2019, S. 51, Original Édition Syllepse, Paris, 1992

Andi Teichmann (*1975, München) is an electronic musician, DJ. With his brother Hannes he forms the duo Gebrüder Teichmann, who together initiate music related projects and collaborations and run the music label NOLAND. Rooted in Berlin‘s underground and DIY-culture since the late nineties, they are driven by a vibrant curiosity and love for music and sound and its social relations. They collaborated with artists across a variety of genres and traditions in more than 60 countries as far as Afghanistan, Siberia or Angola. In 2022 Andi finished his master thesis at Art in Context, UDK Berlin.

The sound of water trickling – or more like dripping – from the utility pipes into the large plastic underground tank of our compound always triggered a feeling of relief. Even for me, who lived in the up-market area of Westlands, Nairobi’s erratic water supply system and its confusing schedules provided a weekly dose of concern and anxiety. Will water come this week? Will the tank make it through the coming days? When will the water actually return?

Lucky enough, I had an official piped connection by Nairobi Water and an additional over-ground tank. Many others in Nairobi rather rely on private water vendors, unofficial connections, and various other water supply modes. With a piped system that only covers two thirds of the city’s water demand, Nairobi’s water infrastructure consists of overlapping and sometimes contesting water access options, and a multiplicity of water practices, rhythms, and sounds. Overall, Nairobi’s infrastructural conditions – from roads and transport systems to everyday mobile data use – are everything but equally distributed. Each neighborhood, sometimes each block, has their own infrastructural realities with their own respective soundscapes and rhythms. For the most part, Nairobians across the city rely on myriad other humans, technologies, and practices to access the often-erratic supplies of water, electricity, transport, food, data, and many other necessities. How infrastructures work and how they are distributed reflects on the everyday activities of urban residents, and vice versa, which in turn further contributes to an infrastructural cacophony of sounds and rhythms. Blending out the overwhelming noise of cars and matatus, the hammering sounds of massive constructions, and the blasting of music from uncountable speakers, the subtle to not-so-subtle sounds of infrastructures provide accounts of the distinct multiplicities and inequalities of Nairobi.

At water points and water kiosks across Nairobi, one can listen to many infrastructural accounts and sounds. Especially in under-served areas, residents purchase and fetch water at public points or taps. Largely in the mornings, and mostly women and children, they queue there, they chat or play while waiting, they gossip and argue etc. You can listen to all of this until their hollow, reverberating plastic mitungi are filled with rushing and gurgling 20 liters of water. At home, the gobbling of re-filling other water containers and the dripping, flowing, and swooshing of basic water uses tell you about individual water security and privileges, or the lack thereof. In well-connected and well-off houses, the water often flows silently behind walls until it pitter-patters into solid sinks and showers. In homes without pipes, water is scooped and splashes into plastic buckets and on outdoor surfaces. In these various hydraulic audio expressions one can hear the infrastructural water realities of the city, of which some can be listened to on the streets also. For example, the loud engines of water delivery trucks may dominate street spaces in some residential areas, when water hasn’t come through the pipes as expected and where people are actually able to afford delivered water. And where the city features ghorofabuildings, the humming and screeching sounds of water pumps – that mostly transport water to rooftop tanks for later in-house distribution – tell you not only where residents might have direct taps in their apartments. It also reveals the water network’s incapability to provide appropriate pressure. All in all, from the chatter at water points to the mechanical sounds of trucks and pumps, when you listen closely to these sounds, you understand better the modes and rhythmicity of water distribution, access, and use.

Rooted in a colonial political economy and neo-liberal ideas of cost efficiency, Nairobi’s struggle to provide infrastructure in a regular and equal manner can be audio-experienced when it comes to electricity also. While most homes have some form of power connection, the city experiences roughly 90,000 small to large power interruptions per year. As much as those interruptions are black-outs, they are also sound-outs. Your TV stops, the speakers at bars and clubs go silent, water pumps stop humming, etc. Sometimes these events are preceded by a sudden rumbling, sparkling, hissing sound of a busting transformer nearby, or a tree branch that fell on a power line. Once you hear such a sound, you know chances are high that your place goes silent in the next seconds. For some places, the electric soundscape then becomes dominated by the rumbling of diesel generators that provide back-up supply for those who can afford it. As Brian Larkin has written for Nigeria, also in Nairobi ‘the constant drone of generators is a backdrop to everyday life – often bitterly resented, but reluctantly tolerated as an unalterable part of urban life.’ This audio backdrop is complemented by the beeping of so-called UPS battery systems in offices and many other digital-electronic sounds of uncountable devices, meters, and more in public and private spaces across the city. In comparison to water – for which its availability and presence is audibly distinct and diverse – it is the absence of electricity that produces distinct soundscapes of silences and back-up devices.

Listening closely to infrastructural soundscapes allows us to more deeply experience and understand the city as a space of heterogeneity, polyrhythmicity, and cacophony. Infrastructures and their spatial differentiations are not only a visible part of urban life in Nairobi and elsewhere but also audible – in their presences and absences, in their working conditions and breakdowns. The various sounds and their respective rhythms can help us to uncover persistent shortcomings and inequalities as well as the entanglements between different infrastructures. The humming of water pumps indicates the interconnected availabilities of water and electricity. The silence of black-outs may relate to the absence of Wifi. The rumbling of water trucks on streets tells us about place-specific water shortages. And, in the end, the sounds of infrastructures are connected to other sensorial and ambient experiences, like the vibrations and fumes of generators, and emotional reactions, like my own feelings of relief when I heard water trickling into my tank. There are many more open avenues for artistic, academic, and multi-sensorial investigations into urban infrastructures. Let us use all of our senses to follow those, by watching, smelling, tasting, feeling, and listening.

Moritz Kasper is a doctoral researcher at the International Planning Studies (IPS) research group (Department of Spatial Planning, Technical University Dortmund). He largely works on heterogeneous, socio-technical realities of the urban everyday, for example the practices and artefacts of domestic storage (water and electricity) in Nairobi. He is also a member of the “Urban Waterscapes and the Pandemic” research project and an associated member at the collaborative research center “Re-Figuration of Spaces” (CRC 1265). In the past, he has worked for Goethe-Institut Kenya, HafenCity Hamburg GmbH, Samuel Hall, and others in research, design, cultural events, public relations, and editing in Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, Zambia, and Tanzania.