For more than two decades, Sublime Frequencies has stood among the most singular voices in the documentation of music from communities and geographies underserved by the global record industry. Their latest, Himba Hymn: Ghosts Of Namibia's Skeleton Coast, presents recordings made on location with Himba musicians in the Namib desert of northwest Namibia, produced and recorded by Ian Brennan, with photography by Marilena Umuhoza Delli. Issued in a limited edition LP of 500 copies, it joins the imprint's long-running engagement with field recording as a means of carrying music outside the conventions through which it is typically routed to outside audiences.
Brennan is a Grammy-winning producer whose work since the late 2000s has traced a wide arc through under-documented musical communities, with releases drawn from sessions in Rwanda, Malawi, South Sudan, Cambodia, Tanzania, Vietnam, Comoros, and elsewhere. His 2011 production of Tinariwen's Tassili received the Grammy for Best World Music; subsequent projects with the Zomba Prison Project, Khmer Rouge Survivors, Malawi Mouse Boys, and Ustad Saami have extended a documentary practice that prioritises performance captured in situ, without overdubs, and without the visual and sonic conventions that typically frame these encounters for listeners abroad. Delli, Italian-Rwandan photographer and longstanding working partner across this body of work, is co-author of the project.
The recordings were captured in the desert of northwest Namibia - widely cited as the oldest in the world, and the driest - in collaboration with Himba musicians whose visual representation in global media has long preceded any recognition of their sound. The stated aim, articulated in Brennan's liner notes, is to invert that economy: to listen rather than gaze. The central instrument across the ten pieces is the cattle gun, a wind instrument made from the long horn of an oryx and coated in mud, producing a breathy, rattled tone that recurs throughout the program. Voice is treated with equivalent weight, with singers generating natural chorus and flanging effects by cupping hands over mouth; live looping is introduced on three tracks to extend the vocal interplay into denser, more spectral fields.
Song titles - Lion Attack, Cattle Massacre, Be Brave In The Face Of Death, Who Is Going To Welcome The White People, The Boers Do Not Have Mercy - locate the material directly within its lived setting. These are not folkloric reconstructions or staged performances for the visitor; the framing throughout resists the picturesque, both in the recording method and in the accompanying photographs by Delli. What emerges is a body of sound at once unmistakably specific to its place and, in its handling of vocal layering and acoustic processing, unexpectedly close to forms more typically associated with contemporary experimental practice.
Issued by Sublime Frequencies (cat. SF132) in a strictly limited pressing of 500 copies, the LP includes a 4-page colour insert with photographs of the musicians and liner notes by Brennan. Total running time is just under thirty minutes. A first document of its kind, this one will not sit around.
