Artist: Kamran Sadeghi
Title: Approximation
Year: 2015 
Label: Sternberg press
12” Gatefold


INFO: 

New-York based musician and member of the Soundwalk collective Kamran Sadeghi contributed a musical score to Mario Pfeifer's video installation Approximation in the Digital Age of a Humanity Condemned to Disappear(2014). Sadeghi’s takes the field recordings of Yaghan chants made by the missionary and anthropologist Martin Gusinde in Bahia Mejillones in 1923, and uses them as a point of departure and reference for his digital compositions. The Yaghan charts, one of which is published here as adigital reproduction of the original recordings- are the only documents of their kind of the religious ceremonies and rites of the Yaghans, who have inhabited the southernmost parts of the world for more than 6,500 years and were, at that time, living free on Shunuko, an island today known as Isla Navarino, in Tierra del Fuego. The original field recordings were made on wax cylinders, which are hosed today in the ethnomusicoloigy collection at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin-Dahlem, where they were digitized using custom-made apparatus.