Berlin-based, Nairobi-born sound artist Joseph Kamaru, who records and performs as KMRU, explores the overlaps and contrasts of natural and artificial sound through field recordings and machine learning. In As Nature, KMRU investigates the invisible and usually unheard network of electromagnetic signals that surrounds and interacts with our world. Birdsong and insect chatter emerge from buzzing, wobbling feedback shimmer, and human voices flicker half-heard through waves of ambient noise as if from insecure transmissions. Dramatising the unseen, KMRU gives our technology-heavy world a ghostly new dimension.
Visuals are from Markus Heckman: patterns of light shift and glow behind prismatic screens that reveal as much as they conceal, illustrations of how electromagnetic fields interact and interfere with one another.
Kindly supported by the Goethe Institut, Glasgow.
Sonica Surge 2023 from Sonica on Vimeo.
