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Aminata pounding millet
6th December, 2008 6:32 pm Leave a Comment
Today in the Dogon village of Djiguibombo we learnt how to make tô – a kind of thick millet porridge which is pretty much the staple food in this part of Mali. We learnt from an expert: Aminata, who is 15 and has been making the tô for her whole family since her mother died some years ago. And we realised how hard work it is: you have to pound the millet into flour by hand in an enormous mortar & pestle. Just listen to how hard she hits it.

It’s worth listening to this using headphones or proper speakers – on laptop speakers you can’t really hear the bass sounds of the pounding properly.

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Balafon and djembe
3rd December, 2008 11:50 pm Leave a Comment
Went out drinking in Ségou this evening, and found a band (Groupe Pawari) playing in a bar. One guy with a balafon, one with a very loud djembe drum, and someone occasionally doing a bit of singing. Actually they all seemed to be able to play all the instruments – especially Issa.

We didn’t take any photos of the band, or the bar. So here’s one of the sunset instead.

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Insects and waterfalls
23rd November, 2008 1:38 pm Leave a Comment
While staying in Dandé, a village up on the cliff a few kilometres from the Guinean border, we took a walk to the next-door village, Afia, and a bunch of the local boys took us to take a look at their waterfall. This is the greenest, lushest part of Senegal, and the forest we walked through was full of the most intense, almost psychedelic, insect sounds I’ve heard. This is the sound of us walking through the forest, crossing a stream and getting to the waterfall.

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Fonio in the morning
9:02 am Leave a Comment
You wake up in the dark and look at the time – it’s only 5am! What could have woken you? You can hear insects chirping, and a cock crowing in the distance, but that’s not it. Then you hear low women’s voices, and the pounding – a deep, muffled, insistent sound. Drums? But why would people be drumming this early? Then you remember – it’s just breakfast …

This is Dandé, a little village up in the hills on the Senegalese side of the border with Guinea. People here mostly eat fonio, a grain with little round seeds which looks a bit like couscous, and usually gets steamed in a similar way. It was entirely wild until a few decades ago, and it’s very nutritious – but to get the little skins off you have to pound it in a large wooden mortar, with a huge pestle, for a long time. So the women and girls of the village get up very early every day to start pounding …

I love this recording – the way the rhythm keeps changing and sounds almost musical. But to listen to it, make sure you use headphones or proper speakers – on my laptop speakers it really doesn’t work (you can’t hear the deep bass sound of the pounding at all).

Click here to listen.

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Olive harvest
20th October, 2008 11:27 am Leave a Comment
Last night we were staying at Le Bled, the organic farm which supplies the excellent Marrakesh restaurant Dar Moha. As luck would have it, it was time for the olive harvest, so we spent the morning with the hard-working ladies around the olive trees – helping a bit, but mostly watching and learning from Ibrahim the head gardener how to pick and cure the various kinds of olives. Here’s a recording, of people chatting and olives plopping onto the ground.

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Bells de jour
25th July, 2008 7:42 pm Leave a Comment
Today we went to the valley of Abondance, here in the Haute-Savoie, where they make the delicious gruyere-style Abondance cheese. We walked up to one of the high alpine pastures where farmers graze their cows in summer, to let them eat the lush green grass that gets covered in snow in winter. Finding a farmhouse, we sat down to tuck into their cheese, just as the cows came home after their day’s grass-eating work in the fields, the bells round their necks ringing.

This is what they sounded like.

Click here to listen.

And as a special treat, we even have a couple of video clips of them walking home ringing their bells:

Video 1 (quite big, about 12Mb)

Video 2 (smaller, about 5Mb)

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Dinner with the cinta senese
19th June, 2008 7:01 pm Leave a Comment
There’s a lot of interesting things about staying at Spannocchia, but one of the most interesting (for us, at least) was meeting the pigs. They have a herd of rare breed Cinta Senese pigs, which they use to make their extremely tasty cured sausages and meats. The pigs themselves have a happy life, rooting around in the woods and fields, and eating pretty much whatever they can find with great gusto.

Click here to listen.

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Dinner with the cinta senese
7:01 pm Leave a Comment
There’s a lot of interesting things about staying at Spannocchia, but one of the most interesting (for us, at least) was meeting the pigs. They have a herd of rare breed Cinta Senese pigs, which they use to make their extremely tasty cured sausages and meats. The pigs themselves have a happy life, rooting around in the woods and fields, and eating pretty much whatever they can find with great gusto.

Click here to listen.

Click here for more audio samples.
Blowing their own horns
10th May, 2008 10:16 pm Leave a Comment
Football is the most-supported sport in Turkey, and Galatasaray are the most-supported football team. This season, they won the Turkish league. This was quite a big deal for their supporters all over Turkey (not just in their home town of Istanbul – on the night when they were confirmed as champions, we were in Cappadocia, but judging by the hooting horns and revving cars all evening, you’d have thought a local team had just won).

Anyway, tonight was the last game of the season, and time for the real celebration. Özge took us to their stadium in Istanbul. The fans are particularly proud of this stadium and the atmosphere they generate – others call it “a cauldron of hate“, they call it “Hell” (as in “welcome to”). Judging by the amount of smoke and flames we saw, a fairly appropriate name.

Then we went to Taksim Square to join the street party.

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Springtime for frogs
13th April, 2008 10:46 pm Leave a Comment
It must be spring. We’ve been staying up in the hills near Mudurnu (about 6 hours east of Istanbul), and couldn’t help but notice that the local fauna is starting to wake up and look around. This includes the frogs in the pond next to where we’re staying (the Değirmenyeri mountain houses), which have been making an unmissable noise most of the night.

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