Songlines 'David Attenborough' Remix Competition

July 15, 2019·28 min·2 clips

Sir David Attenborough reflects on hearing his own 1956 field recordings for the first time in nearly 60 years.

Host Keris Matthews opens by introducing a remix competition launched on May 10th in partnership with PRS Foundation, open to UK music creators. The source material is a Gamelan track called Gendawayang, recorded by Sir David Attenborough in Bali in 1956 during the BBC's Zoo Quest series. The track is one of 56 field recordings featured on the double album David Attenborough: My Field Recordings from Across the Planet, produced by Songlines magazine and released on RAS Records. The competition attracted over 300 submissions from across the UK. A distinguished judging panel — including Sir David Attenborough, Jazz Peterson, Ghost Poet, Hannah Peel, and Matthew Herbert — reviewed all entries and selected a shortlist of six finalists. The episode then profiles each finalist in turn. Arca, also known as Alejandra Gersi, is a Venezuelan experimental artist described as a shapeshifting visionary working at the intersection of vulnerability and explosive energy. Burland is characterised as a creator who fuses organic traditional instrument textures with electronic dance music. Clism is the ambient side project of Rachel Barker, who combines field recordings and vaporwave influences and is currently working on a project documenting the Scunthorpe Steelworks. Kotorashki, the project of Nicola Grouet, draws on Bulgarian countryside sounds and Balkan music, with a debut album released in 2009. Allison Selby is a 23-year-old musician, programmer, and poet from the Isle of Wight and Brighton, making Warp-inspired experimental electronic and noisy post-punk music. Sally Street is a 32-year-old multi-instrumentalist and evolutionary anthropologist from southeast London, influenced by minimalism, electronica, and video game music. Listeners are directed to vote at songlines.co.uk/remix before September 15th, with all votes entered into a prize draw for a signed copy of the Attenborough album. The public vote winner will receive an award and perform their remix live at the Songlines Music Awards Ceremony on November 30th at Earth in Dalston, London. The episode closes with a recorded statement from Sir David Attenborough himself, reflecting on the experience of hearing his own field recordings after nearly 60 years. He describes the strange sensation of seeing photographs of his younger self versus hearing the sounds that surrounded him — arguing that sound, unlike images, does not make you feel like an outsider to your own past but instead transports you directly back into the moment.

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