Uitgebracht
February 2022
- A beautiful ambient daydream that evokes the artist's memories of her hometown Nairobi, made while stuck abroad during the pandemic.
- Nyokabi Kariũki's debut EP Peace Places: Kenyan Memories is about as edenic as electronic music gets. It's best enjoyed alone in a quiet place, not just because the depth of the sound design is easily missed on a walk or a bus, but because it's explicitly designed to transport the listener to somewhere else. The young producer was cut off from her native Nairobi while stuck in the US during the pandemic, so she made her own dream-version of her hometown with field recordings, electronics, voice, keyboards and kalimba. It's a silly-grin-on-your-face kind of album, not because the music is particularly soothing—in fact, many of the sounds are rather harsh—but because the place it conjures is so idyllic.
Kariũki paints her hometown as a paradise teeming with life. These tracks are filled not just with the sounds of birds, insects and domestic animals but with voices speaking languages commonly heard in Kenya, including English, Swahili, Kikuyu and Maa. On "Home Piano," the titular instrument she learned to play as a child is so surrounded by organic sounds and other rustlings that it sounds exposed to the elements. The distinctions between human machinations and the natural world are paper-thin, whether she's recording her interactions with farm animals on "Ngurumo" or singing with jazzy ecstasy on "Galu" about the prospect of swimming in the Indian Ocean.
Kariũki's voice is prominent throughout, blossoming into stacked chords on "Equator Song," whispering and singing in different corners of the mix. Because of this, Peace Places scans as a little more pop than it actually is at first, but a closer listen will reveal how much of this album is shorn of melody or rhythm, how Kariũki lets the field recordings largely speak for themselves rather than distorting or subsuming them. We understand that all these sounds have strong and specific meanings to their curator, and for Kariũki, Peace Places recreates a place in her memory she can go back to from time to time. The rest of us can only imagine.
Tracklist01. Equator Song
02. A Walk Through My Cūcū's Farm
03. Galu
04. Home Piano
05. Ngurumo, or Feeding Goats Mangoes
06. Naila's Peace Place