Tuesday, 10th November:
At 9pm tonight Paul Nataraj explores loss, grief, family and love in ‘Cobblestones and Kitchari’.
Paul began writing the piece in January 2013, the month before his father died and it was eventually completed in 2020. The work is presented as a continuous narrative exploring places and events from his life, through childhood, his father’s illness and unexpected death. Each of the works included are produced from sounds connected to his father and his immediate UK and extended Indian family. The individual sections are expressions of sonic memory, audio testimony and the shifts in the perceptions of those memories over time. . As well as being a portrait of a family, this work also explores transnationalism, and minority identity formation and is in many ways an ethnographic study through the prism of sound. This work is an exploration of the transitory points of listening and how they change and change us over time. Acts of listening and creating memory are in constant flux, not fixed. Making memory and identity formation is dynamic, non-generic and a labile process especially through traumatic times. It is the merging of spaces, places and objects, it is skewed repetition, it is voices unremembered, fragile and moving, timbres rather than words, one sided conversation, echoes and the liminal intersections of dreams, perception, reality and emotion – it is not just one song. These memories coalesce around words, move across worlds and drift as people, either absent or present, adding to the layers we accrue over time. They become the threads in the fabric of who we are and the practice of our everyday lives. Movements, re-tellings, gestures, and their concomitant sounds both recorded and transient, rest in these liminal spaces, and maybe that’s where this should be heard.