Every city has its own sound—literally. Beyond whatever music might get played there, every place on earth emits a set of frequencies that is completely unique. For Joseph Kamaru, these identities are as distinct as skylines. “Soundscapes reveal a lot about how people think and behave,” he recently told Resident Advisor. He notices them when he goes somewhere new and explores them in his music. Often, they make him think of his home city, Nairobi.
Kamaru moved to Berlin in 2020. Since then, he’s recorded over a dozen records that position him as a master of esoteric sound: a blend of ambient, drone, noise, and field recordings, defined by tactile sound design and an emotional palette that runs from haunting to serene. In 2022, he composed what would become As Nature, a live show inspired, as he put it in an email, by “the electromagnetic sounds and hidden noises in Nairobi that are so present that the inhabitants of the city become connected with them.” He played it again and again at experimental events across Europe, tweaking it until he formed an intense bond with the music. “I became it,” he says.
Natur, which arrives on the UK label Touch, is the album version of that performance. In its attempt to capture ineffable qualities of his home city, it is also a personal record. It is, like much of Kamaru’s music, subtly political as well, shifting the focus to an East African city in an art form dominated by Western bias. More than anything, though, it shows his unique way of hearing the world around him in extraordinary detail, and shaping those impressions into a surreal musical work.
A single, 52-minute piece, Natur bobs and weaves through crackling noise and balmy ambience. For Kamaru, the sound of Nairobi at night is all about electricity, from the hiss of open transformers to electrosmog—sounds inaudible to the naked ear but captured by Kamaru’s electromagnetic microphones—all set against a darkness deep enough to be broken by low-lit iPhone screens. In its calmer sections, Natur serves up whispers, birdsong, footfalls and muffled crowds, humid drones and barely-there melodic loops. In its more chaotic sections, frequencies wail, whoosh, and crash. Above all, they buzz. At times the album feels like a gallery of the countless distinct forms electrical buzzing can take.
Ambient as much of it is, the result is the opposite of background music. Natur is a voltaic odyssey, a ghost train rumbling, twisting and floating through this aural rendering of Nairobi at night. Kamaru has written about what he calls “activated listening,” a closely intentional form of listening that Natur demands of its listeners from its opening section, a swelling wave of electrical currents that crests just before it short-circuits. Perhaps because it took shape as a live performance, this is a dynamic, ever-evolving composition, one that moves through a sequence of scenes as distinct as they are abstract.
Take the passage about 15 minutes in, when a barrage of white-hot frequencies mercifully gives way to a haze of soothing, natural sounds. Kamaru follows this pattern for much of the record’s first half, swerving through a thicket of noise, then slipping, at just the right moment, into a stretch of relative serenity. After a while, the two modes blur together into something droning and hypnotic.
Every moment along this drifting path is bursting with vivid detail. Layered together or presented in turn, Kamaru’s sounds are carefully sculpted and lovingly displayed, artifacts of the invisible world his work explores. It’s usually hard to tell field recordings—presented as-is or embellished in the studio—apart from sounds entirely of his creation. Still, the record demonstrates something Kamaru senses more easily than the rest of us, which is the richness and drama of everyday sounds. Natur helps us hear what he hears.
