Kenian electronic musician and sound artist, currently doing the MA in Sound Arts in Berlin’s UDK. KMRU explores the genre of ambient music through his experience and practice in field recording and sound walks. His origin in the outskirts of Nairobi expose KMRU to a nature rich soundscape, developing listening techniques and an acute awareness on the space and environment. Releases such as Peel and Logue have created a name for KMRU in the electronic music scene, working and collaborating with the biggest institutions and organisations, such as Ableton and Adam Audio. Performance is a key aspect of KMRU’s work, using minimal musical equipment with the philosophy of exploiting such to their furthest technical capabilities, instead of having a big array of tools, having less control over them. KMRU seeks with his practice to shift or turn around the image of the African musician and composer, opening way to the electronic music field and sonic experimentation, trying to brake with the categorisation of African music as purely folkloric. Alongside Ableton, KMRU has created music production workshops across his country, introducing electronic music tools and techniques to the youth with the purpose of provoking an interest in the medium.

Under The Bridge is a documentary about KMRU’s field recording practice, exploring questions of the matter such as: what/who/why/where are you listening?. His research surrounds the concept of ‘listening as being’, investigating the social relations of a community with the soundscape of the place. In the documentary, KMRU goes back to sceneries of his past and applies this framework to analyse the transformation of such environment across time. This analysis has an ecological and social objective. Kibra was KMRU’s next step in his research, consisting of recording and sound mapping one of Nairobi biggest slum’s (Kibra) and creating a set of ambient compositions with them. Tinted drones and melancholic tones are paired with sounds of the city, colouring and associating an emotion to the ecology of the place, attempting to bring to light the socio-political issues of that part of Nairobi. The poverty, government neglection and misery of Kibra are exposed in these compositions, using sonic evidence as its driving source.

Luckily I had the opportunity to meet KMRU a couple of months ago. Me and a group of friends went for dinner with him, at then end of the evening I had some chance to speak one to one with him. We talked about both our works, and he gave me some insights and tips to reach out to organisations in order to promote my work. KMRU told me in detail how his creative process takes part, and how performing in more established venues had shaped his work in order to expand his technical capabilities. After a performance KMRU had in the Barbican, he realised that his work sometimes failed to meet the sonic range of the sound system in those stablished venues. As his experience started in a Lo-Fi minimalistic studio and set-up, he was not used to detailed systems. Even though his lack of experience in this systems, KMRU told me with enthusiasm that he had found the opportunity of composing up to 8 bass voices with those systems, finding a refreshing new field in his own compositions. I found this to be deeply inspiring, not because I found out that detailed sound systems could actually give me the possibility to explore more complex frequency structures in my practice, but to see that an artist with a long and successful trajectory in the field managed to frequently discover new rewarding aspects of the medium and find joy and reward from them. It made me feel more comfortable with the future of my practice as I have to admit that the dreadful thought of stagnation has passed through my head. But to see a practitioner with such enthusiasm in a new discovery made me realise that stagnation in my creative process could only be a transition state, and that I could always manage to find another field or aspect to experiment with.