Kin_ (Cultura Plasmic INC) is our Artist of the Month for July. In her first blog for the website, she discusses her new record Hurrian Cult Legacy, and the ideas explored through it.
It was in 2019 that I started developing ideas for the project that became Hurrian Cult Legacy. I had always been interested in the use of music (both in terms of music-making practices and in its content) to challenge oppressive power structures and create spaces to challenge the status quo. Even if it is not always explicitly so, music is political. Drawing people together on a dancefloor, creating bonds through listening and engaging in cultural exchanges, recognising who is involved in the music-making process, any hierarchies at play, and so on; this is just a handful of examples.
What I wanted to do with Hurrian Cult Legacy was create a series of audio works that responded to what I perceived to be the rising of island mentality in the UK. I started looking for examples of music – particularly those tied into folk traditions – that had historically circulated between different cultures and nations. The notion of tradition in general is often used to perpetuate fixed origin stories and illusions that ‘things have always been this way’, and to demarcate boundaries between people. The reality is a lot more complex – culture is a continually shifting fluidity with influences coming from all directions. The construction of tradition as something diametrically opposed to progress (another problematic term) obscures this malleability and the exchanges that happen between generations.
In my research I came across a piece called Da Greenland Man’s Tune, a folk melody which is both at once a Scottish traditional tune and also theorised by some to have ties with the indigenous Yakki-speaking population in Greenland. One story goes that during Shetland’s whaling era, workers onboard these Polar expeditions brought back this tune before it was absorbed into the traditional fiddle music of Shetland. It is a tune that marks the circulation of music and intercultural exchange, so I wanted the music composition to echo this sentiment. Working with the melody, the tune flows between voicings rather than staying within a single instrument’s parameters. There is this sense of an oceanic wave motion, and instead of seeing each instrument as an ‘individual’ as such (its own island), I wanted to create much more of a feeling of collectivity.
In September 2020, I got to spend some time in Linz, Austria, at the Interface Cultures lab and that’s where I met Iranian video artist Razieh Kooshki. She works a lot with Touchdesigner to create very fluid audio-responsive visuals so I asked her if she would like to create the video for this piece. As it is a work that frames the ocean as a connecting medium, rather than some kind of impermeable barrier or boundary, the visuals really reflect that. At times it looks like the view through a body of blue-green water as it refracts the light, whereas in other parts it bears more resemblance to a transient map of contour lines and shifting mountainous peaks.
This is a piece I am hoping to further develop with ambisonics during my residency at the University of Hull and Yorkshire Sound Women Network later this year.
Listen to the full album on Bandcamp here: