Undercurrents of Memory: Nepal Chapter

拾夢者的記憶伏流：尼泊爾篇

2023 · Nepal and Southern Taiwan · Sound Work

Undercurrents of Memory: Nepal Chapter is a sound work composed through travel-based field recording, live electronics and immersive listening. Recordings gathered across Nepal—including temple chants, children’s voices, alleyways, sheep, water wheels, village life and festival songs—were edited and transformed into an evolving live composition.
A cobbled brick alley climbs towards a white arched gateway between tall brick houses tangled with power cables, a motorcyclist riding down the middle.

The work does not attempt to construct a complete sonic portrait of Nepal. Instead, it begins with fragments encountered by chance, exploring how sound can return the temperature, distance and embodied memory of a place.

A long house with a red lower wall and blue corrugated roof stands on a grassy hillside under a bright blue sky, with a pole of prayer flags beside it.
In black and white, a winding stone path climbs a bare hillside in mist towards a large unfinished temple-like building on the skyline.

Light, Ritual and Everyday Life

The recordings were made during an important festival of light celebrated by Newar communities. After nightfall, oil lamps and candles illuminated windows, doorways and streets, while music, singing and dancing moved through the city.

A small stone figure and a bare tree trunk, both wrapped in orange marigold garlands and daubed with red powder, in front of a green wall, with a black trident beside them.
An elderly woman with grey hair reaches up to spin a row of copper prayer wheels under a gilded roof, with pigeons on the ground and a small red shrine in the foreground.

Not all the recorded sounds belonged to formal ceremonies. Sheep and children encountered along mountain paths, choral rehearsals heard from the street, the recurring rhythm of water wheels and chants carried from a distant monastery all became part of the sensory life of the place.

Dozens of men sit on woven mats and stools in a brick street corner around a small altar of framed portraits and marigold garlands, with a loudspeaker at the left.

Within the recordings, the sacred and the everyday are not clearly separated. Prayer, labour, play and movement overlap, allowing sound to become a way of approaching lived experience rather than reducing a culture to recognisable symbols.

An elderly woman in a red headscarf looks out from an intricately carved wooden window, seen through hanging wires and a cloth.
Five women in pale shawls look out from a dark wooden doorway in a pink-painted wall.

From Sonic Fragments to Live Composition

The collected recordings were edited, processed and rearranged as material for live electronic composition. Fragments originally separated by time and geography were brought into the same listening space: a chant might emerge from the depth of an alleyway, the rotation of a water wheel might become a rhythmic structure, while the voices of children and animals briefly pass through electronic textures.

The work has no single fixed version. Each presentation is recomposed in response to the space, the movement of sound and the presence of its listeners. Creation therefore becomes not the repetition of a finished composition, but an encounter continually formed in the present.

Men in traditional caps sit on the floor of a narrow room lined with framed pictures, one reading from sheets of paper, with a tabla, a small hand drum and a harmonium in front of them and a yellow sign in Devanagari above the far door.
A woman in a turquoise embroidered outfit plays a harmonium on the floor of a dark carved-wood room while another woman sits beside her holding a small brass instrument and singing.

Sound as a Portal into Memory

Unlike an image, sound does not present a clear boundary for observation. It enters the body from all directions and can evoke emotion, distance and indistinct memory before its source is consciously recognised.

Nepal Chapter approaches distant soundscapes as portals into memory and imagination. Temples, alleyways and villages may belong to another geography, yet their sounds of tenderness, ritual, labour, play and everyday life can still produce a sense of recognition in the listener.

The work does not connect places through their superficial similarities. It considers how sound allows shared human experience to become perceptible within what initially appears unfamiliar.

Two brightly painted Tata trucks parked side by side on a mountain road, decorated with metal panels, ribbons and painted stars.

See also: Undercurrents of Memory

Listen

0:00 / 6:17

Field recordings from Nepal, 2023. Track 3 is the final six minutes of the recording. Best heard on headphones.

Credits

Field Recording / Editing / Live Electronics
Jez Fang
Text / Documentation
Kayo Lu
Photography
Jez Fang
Recording Location
Nepal
Presentation Location
Southern Taiwan
Year
2023
Medium
Field recordings, live electronics, immersive listening
Series
Undercurrents of Memory／拾夢者的記憶伏流

All work