Nkisi’s 'Anomaly Index' opens with the claim that the phonogram was never a neutral witness. From the very first wax cylinders, sound entered the world not as documentation but as vibration, noise, accident: hiss, rumble, collapse. What ethnographers logged as error can now be heard as the earliest forms of noise music, a proto-avant-garde born not from art schools but from the material failings of early technology — a paracoustic terrain where listening already exceeded intention.
Anomaly Index, first premiered at Biennale Musica 2025 in Venice, draws solely from recordings predating 1910 — fragile grooves from Cameroon (1908), Papua New Guinea (1905), and other endangered traces. Within them lie not just voices and instruments, but machines colliding with weather, air breaking into static, pitch warping into unstable loops. Side A embraces this debris directly, amplifying the hiss and collapse until it becomes rhythm and texture in itself. Side B introduces percussion, minimal instrumentation, and electronics, weaving speculative futures out of archival residue, where ritual and malfunction blur into one another.
Rather than treating the archive as heritage or restoration, Nkisi hears it as radical experiment: documents that never knew they were avant-garde. Before Futurism’s manifesto, before musique concrète or industrial’s machinic pulse, the phonograph cylinder already opened portals to paracoustics — noise as form, vibration as material. To listen now is to encounter recordings that refuse to stay still — not fossils, but forces, reverberating beyond their moment.
Anomaly Index suggests that the archive was always haunted by its own excess — that before the industry trained us how to listen, sound itself was already escaping control. To hear these grooves today is to glimpse an alternate genealogy of experimental music: one born in error, ritual and encounter, still resonating a century later.
credits
released November 28, 2025
Artwork by Marc Armand
Mastered at Declared Sound
Research and Composition by Nkisi
Nyege Nyege Tapes is a Kampala based label exploring, producing and releasing outsider music from around the region and
beyond.
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