*200 copies limited edition* What does tradition mean when the past is tainted by crimes? Who decides what is carried on a collective knowledge and moored in the culture? Rwandan Records is a sound installation, radio play and live concert by Sounding Situations featuring artists from Rwanda and Germany and combines pre-colonial accounts with stories from the present. It invites audience members to immerse themselves in the stories shared by Rwanda and Germany.
What you experience in the piece on a musical level is a soundscape formed out of field recordings of nowadays done by Klaus Janek, musical field recordings and music experts collected in the 20th century starting from 1907 to the 80ies – the notion of a Rwandan auditive culture scape. The voices of the recordings which are activated by the audience mix an own language soundscape to the space. The private encounters with those voices are now and then sporadically interrupted by a collectively shared concert event: the music of these events you are holding in your hand now.
The music is created by sampling through the archives in order to form an aesthetic synthesis of the music tradition of Rwanda and personalize it through a commonly shared OWN of 1Key and Klaus Janek, which is the fascination of 90ies Hip Hop.