CD – Gruenrekorder

Everything starts with the movie by German director Michael Obert, Song From The Forest, a fascinating journey into the rainforest of Central Africa, organised in the fall of 2009. The notes of the release describe how Obert had heard the story of a white man who lived in the jungle among the Bayaka pygmies and he decided to go in search of him. Obert only later discovered that the man in question was Louis Sarno, an American musicologist who, twenty-five years previously, had left civilization to live in the wilderness area of the Congo and record Bayaka music. Over the years, Sarno collected more than fifteen hundred hours of recordings of Bayaka music, recently donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. This film recounts his return to America. I don’t want to reveal too much of the plot. What matters in our opinion from a purely musical point of view is the intersection of the imagination of the project and its unique documentation, the result of a site-specific work certainly not aimed at those who listen today. Of course the collection of primitive polyphonic songs, interlocking melodies and tribal percussion is no longer completely new and can be found in similar ethnographic recordings. What appears here is authentic material documented “from the inside” and enlivened by Sarno’s own uncompromising rejection of the American way of life, only later developed into a kind of social and cultural criticism that is tangible in the movie.

 

Song From The Forest: The Soundtrack

 

Song From The Forest – Trailer