This album was a collaboration with singer, songwriter, and DJ, Anna Bahow. The intention was to create a record that could not be immediately located geographically or within a specific musical tradition. Inspired by word art, in which letters and symbols are presented as aesthetic material in their own right, the written album and song titles were abstracted, and artist names reduced to initials. The album title is an abstraction of the word phenomenology. The song titles combined puns, layers of translation, and using symbols to represent syllables.
Composed during my Masters in Creative Practice at Goldsmiths, it was a culmination of creative research into applying to the cello stringed instrument techniques from multiple musical traditions. I had spent some time studying with Fulani Griot, Juldeh Camara, who plays the riti (single string fiddle) and Xalam (Wolof – it known as ngoni in Bambara, hoddu in Fulani, and other names in other West African languages). I learned a number of plucked and bowed techniques from Juldeh, which inspired a great deal of the musical material of the album. I was also inspired by string techniques of the kora, with which I had grown up hearing, as well as the Ethiopian fiddle, the Masenqo, the Krar, the Gmbiri and the left hand techniques of my other instrument, sitar.
The lyrics of the songs responded to participation in community activism in London, life as a low wage worker, finding new ways of imagining the world. We reflected on ultra-specific, localised details like a specific interaction in Camberwell on the one hand, and massive ideas such as cosmology and anti-colonial imaginations, on the other.
Dr Pete Yelding 