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EP RELEASE: peace places: kenyan memories (SA Recordings)

Available (digitally & on Limited Edition 12” Vinyl) on 25 February 2022 on Bandcamp, SA Recordings’ Product Store, and on all streaming platforms!


I wrote ‘peace places: kenyan memories’ while away from home, Kenya, in the United States, during the pandemic. I found that imagining peaceful, gentle, memories from my 18 years of a childhood in Kenya became an earnest antidote to remedy homesickness and emotional fatigue — snd almost naturally, these imaginations evoked a very visceral and creative response within me.

From my childhood home in Nairobi, where my piano, gifted to me at age 8, still sits; to my ather’s hometown of Kĩrĩnyaga (‘Ngurumo, or Feeding Goats Mangoes’) and my grandmother’s farm in Kiambu (A Walk Through My Cũcũ’s Farm); from holidays by the Kenyan coast (‘Galu’ and ‘Naila’s Peace Place’) to a few in Laikipia (‘Equator song’); these places find themselves crystallised in each track of the EP, most apparent through the inclusion of field recordings taken in respective place; but also in the music and lyricism of the pieces. But as I worked on this record, the more I realised that my mind was not only taking solace in imagining ‘home’ as physical spaces, but also in seeing that ‘home’ was in ancestry; in language and words; in family and friends; in the palpability of my instruments; in harmony but also dissonance, and of course, in music.