Whitney Wei: What is your musical background? Let's start from the beginning (and how you ended up coming to Berlin from Nairobi to study at the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste).

KMRU: I grew up in a sort of musical family. My grandfather was a musician, but we never grew up with him. My mom and my parents used to play tapes of his music a lot. I was in choir as a child. I feel like all my childhood upbringing was surrounded by music. As a kid, my dad bought us a really small piano, and I remember trying to find the batteries to make it work. Music was always very present, but I was not sure if that's what I was going to do. In Nairobi, even the public transport had vibrant music—like hip-hop—with booming sound systems. I had this fascination with playing loud music. Going to school with my brother on the bus, we usually wanted to ride on the loudest buses [painted] with graffiti.

In primary school, I used to sing in the choir—lots of folk songs or arrangements of music from Kenya. In high school, I decided to do music as a subject, and that's when things took shape and I realised music was something that I could study.

After finishing high school, I wanted to do music, so I bought a guitar and started learning how to play. This was also a time when my grandfather's music was becoming apparent, because in high school, we were singing some of his songs as part of our repertoire. During university, I majored in music tech but it ended up being very theory-based. This is when I encountered electronic music or making music on a computer.

In 2017, I came to Berlin for a residency. Before that, I was unsure about the music I was trying to make. It's mostly textures and it's not danceable, but coming here, there were many people who made this kind of music. I also had this tiny iPod and was recording the train with my earphones. A big shift happened when I bought a Zoom recorder [later on] and I noticed there were more sounds around than we realize. I once gave it to my dad to listen to the neighborhood, and I think I was just in awe of the sounds and carrying the playback of my hometown in the recorder.

After the residency, I went back home and that's when I decided to develop KMRU [my current artist project]. In 2019, I came back [to Berlin] for another residency. After COVID happened and I lost my job teaching music production [at the local university in Nairobi], I applied for my masters [at UdK], which brought me to Berlin to study. Things just snowballed—getting an agent, getting shows. It's been about four or five years now [and I graduated last year].

Whitney Wei: Experiment with what exactly?

KMRU: Maybe it was from my academic cycles, but I was struggling so much trying to contextualize my work. Because I had to explain so much, I decided all my projects would be related to home or Kenya or field recordings. It allowed me to  think more about my home in Nairobi and home in Berlin from a time perspective, but then also having the room to relate to things that are happening in both cities. 

Whitney Wei: What do you make of the creative community in Berlin from your time here?

KMRU: I think Berlin offers so much, and I have this connection with the city that allows me to do whatever I want and just experiment a lot. Sometimes you feel like no one cares or judges you. But being here for so long, I realized there's this pattern of how I was inspired in the past that's kind of not changing a lot. I don't think I'd be living here if I was not moving around a lot. I travel so much, coming back to Berlin for just two weeks before leaving again. Berlin allows me to think more about home in Nairobi from a distance, and having the room to just create.

Whitney Wei: You document sound on a handheld recorder to then engage in a discourse of field recording, noise, and sound art. How has listening intently to different cities made you observe them in different ways? What are the distinct sonic differences between Berlin, and say, London or Nairobi? 

KMRU: Coming back from Berlin to Nairobi the first time, being in the subway, going to the train was quieter than how I remembered it. I always try to relate to different cities with what is familiar. I notice tiny things like traffic light sounds—for example, they have weird sounds in Nordic countries compared to others. Different train sounds.

Europe is generally quiet, which is nice, but sometimes I miss the balance in Nairobi. When I went to my childhood neighborhood, it's so loud and intense. Walking to the store in Nairobi, you have to be very hyper-aware—cars coming, people jaywalking everywhere, all sorts of sounds and smells. You're just active.

In Berlin, you can pinpoint where sounds are coming from despite the noise, as opposed to places with so much sound everywhere. Sound is very present here. For example, you can be in the metro and hear very clearly when one annoying person is making a sound. In Nairobi, it's so loud that you wouldn't be able to hear that person. I also think sounds in Nairobi became louder when I moved to Berlin, or maybe I just hear more now.

The language also makes a difference. When I was in London, the train station became louder because I could hear and understand what people were saying—it's like an additional layer of being able to perceive what they're thinking. In Nairobi, it's similar but with different conversations, different dialects.