Singing Wells – Origins News
…neer, Patrick Ondiek, adds, ‘I love producing the final videos and getting phone calls from my friends asking me ‘how did you find these musicians?’ I feel like I’m on the cutting edge of music, bringing these talented musicians to my Nairobi friends.’ We have developed a three year plan to record a wide selection of important tribal musicians in East Africa. We are recording music in Northern Uganda in Autumn 2012 and then we will travel to Tan…
Victoria’s reflections on the music of the Batwa Story
…down to the last shilling and organizing the logistics of taking a team of 10 to Kisoro and beyond. We have spoken on the phone and emailed many times. It’s good to meet at last. The flight to Kigali makes a stop-over in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi. I suddenly realize that by the end of the day I will have been in four different countries – Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. I am already struggling to believe that I am in East Africa when 2…
Bill Odidi reporting on Singing Wells from London News
…med up with Andy Patterson while he was here and together they conducted a number of interviews with Kenyan musicians who are now based in the UK. They also had the chance to visit Kenya House in Stratford as a guest of our friends at the Kenya Tourist Board. Here’s Bill’s article published in Business Daily Africa: http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Where+the+world+got+real+flavour+of+Kenya+in+London/-/1248928/1480860/-/djb5mf/-/index.html Phot…
How to Map 3: Prepare Your Data News
…nk about when preparing your data: The title of each column must not exceed 14 characters. The shorter the better. E.g. instead of ‘Number of Unicorns’, have ‘unic_no’. None of the cells of your Excel file can contain more than 256 characters. Make sure there are no hidden characters such as spaces or backspaces in any of the data cells. Anything upon which a join will be based, e.g. counties in this example, must be spelled exactly the same in Ar…
How to Map 2: The Map Outline News
…always good to keep things tidy. I have entitled this map HTM1 (How To Map 1) and have saved it in a folder called How To Map 1, so the address where it is saved is C:\How To Map\How to Map 1. To get our country outline into ArcMap we need to Add Data. To do this either click File > Add Data > Add Data or select the Add Data icon. This will open a box; click this icon till you reach ‘Home – Documents/ArcGIS’: From here click on Folder Connections…
From Kisoro to Nairobi to Lake Victoria Story
…– when the slaughter happened it was the decedents of folks with less than 10 cows slaughtering the decedents of folks with more than 10 cows. 250,000 people are buried in mass graves 50 metres from the memorial centre. What is hardest to understand, travelling through Kigali, is that the slaughter started here. This is an urban centre filled with incredibly friendly Rwandans. And yet, when the President’s plane was shot down on 6th April 1994, t…
Day 6: The Studio @ Traveller’s Rest Hotel, Kisoro Story
…inyo. Here, they put down their track. Not at all phased by the use of headphones and mics, they take everything in there stride, performing a number of takes as the song develops. We start by giving them a simple click to follow the beat but quickly realised that their tempos are far more subtle than this. Francis comes back to set the rhythm with their natural clapping and it suddenly all came together again. Once we have the female vocals recor…
Day 3: From Nairobi to Kigali to Kisoro Story
…reen of the vegetation. It is known negatively, of course, for the horrible 1994 genocide that was launched from its capital. Rwanda is roughly the size of the US state of Maryland, or Wales in Great Britian and has a population of 11.4 million. It’s econony was devasted by the genocide but is recovering; a major source of its recovery is the tourist industry, centred on the famed mountain gorillas. Uganda: Known as the ‘pearl of Africa’ – it too…
Kenya (Coast): Day 4 – the road back to Nairobi Story
…rth certificate. It said December 15th. So my actual birth date is December 12, but my recorded birthday is December 15th, when my mum actually filled in the forms. Q: How did you get involved with Ketebul and Singing Wells? SK: I set out to be a graphic designer in multi-media. I was in college for Graphics Designs and met a lot of musicians there and started with music production, music software, starting with Fruity Loops. I remember the first…
Lake Turkana Cultural Festival 2011 News
…o allow them to undertake the trip to this remote area of North West Kenya, 800 km from Nairobi and home to the Turkana and Samburu tribes and the original ‘singing wells’. When Steve Kivutia (Ketebul Music) presented the idea of recording music at the Festival to the AMF, it seemed a perfect fit with the objectives of the Singing Wells project and the trustees were happy to approve a grant to cover the costs of travelling to the Festival with the…
More Ketebul voices…Steve reports from the field News
…t night were around 31°C and humid), Paradise Hotel scored a minus 4 on the 1 to 10 scale, 1 being disastrous. Despite all the mishaps with the Hotel, we were all excited to be heading out for our first day of recording. But first we had to change a flat tyre on car number 02. Half an hour or so later, we were all geared up and ready to go. Jesse, who had just arrived after taking the night bus from Nairobi to Malindi, joined us in car number 02….