Listening otherwise and the limits of the colonial archive: A reflection on KMRU’s Temporary Stored

In 2022, sound artist and ambient musician Joseph Kamaru, artistically known as KMRU, released Temporary Stored, an album built around archival recordings found in the sound archive of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium. The project explores the colonial histories and structures underlying the preservation of sounds originating from different African communities. In 2024, he expanded the project with Temporary Stored II, a collaborative album that brings together other artists to reinterpret and rework archival recordings. Both projects are available on Bandcamp.

Through the processes of collection, preservation and classification, these archival recordings can become detached from the people, communities and cultural contexts that shaped their meanings. Within the institutional framework of the museum, living cultural practices are often recontextualised as objects of ethnographic knowledge, interpreted through points of view and categories that may not reflect the perspectives of the communities from which they originate. Representing other cultures involves producing knowledge about them, which consequently affects what becomes known and what remains unknown or unacknowledged.

The album description accompanying Temporary Stored argues that the taking of cultural property from colonised territories has led to the objectification of sounds, people, tools and other materials. It then presents these materials not merely as objects, but as potential carriers of stories, spiritual relationships and knowledge transmitted across generations. From this perspective, sounds that once formed part of living cultural practices, sounds understood as embodied, living phenomena, risk being treated as isolated objects, separated from the relationships that gave them meaning. As a result, their spiritual, embodied and epistemological dimensions are overlooked.

This raises questions about the colonial logic underlying the archive and its role in determining how other cultures are represented and understood. Who has the authority to define truth and history? What aspects of particular communities and ways of life are made visible, and what is excluded? What is preserved, and what is left out or forgotten? Knowledge production is never neutral: some perspectives are legitimised, some remain unheard.

KMRU’s intervention invites us to consider how these left-out dimensions might be approached through sound, while acknowledging that their original meanings cannot necessarily be fully recovered. He transforms the recordings into new sonic compositions: he recomposes the sounds by blending them with synthesizers and other field recordings, transforming them rather than merely reproducing them. In this sense, he challenges the treatment of these recordings as static museum objects and opens up a different way of engaging with the archival material. Through this process, the reworking of the archival material challenges the authority of ethnographic archives. His intervention can then be understood as an attempt to relate and engage differently with archival recordings, and to question the conditions under which they are preserved. 

The role of noise in both albums is also worth analysing. In Temporary Stored (I & II), the background noise and graininess of the archival and field recordings used are often embraced, rather than erased to achieve a “cleaner” sound. As the collective Archive for the Eleventh Hour explores in the article In Between Silence and Noise, the background noise of historical recordings makes perceptible the temporal and spatial distance separating the listener from the moment in which the recordings were made. Although the recordings discussed there differ from those used by KMRU, this idea offers a useful way of approaching Temporary Stored, where the noise, which manifests itself through sonic textures and imperfections, often becomes part of the listening experience. This noise acts as a reminder that it is not possible to fully recover or revisit the past; the recording does not provide full access to the event it documents, and therefore listening to it does not provide complete knowledge about it. It reminds us of the gaps existing between us and the sonic and cultural expressions recorded, gaps that cannot be erased through listening.

This approach raises broader questions: how to represent and engage with cultural practices which are unknown to us and whose meaning cannot be fully recovered? The answer is not necessarily to abandon representation, but to acknowledge its limits. Rather than claiming or believing that certain archived materials can provide us with detailed knowledge of another culture, we might recognise its opacity. The other is never entirely reducible to our knowledge of it; there is always something that escapes our comprehension. Furthermore, the desire to make another culture entirely knowable and transparent has historically reproduced relations of appropriation and control, reducing complex ways of life to what can be understood from an external perspective.

Opacity, however, does not mean impossibility of understanding; instead, it asks for a more attentive and less possessive relationship with what we encounter. To recognize the limits of our knowledge is also to question the authority through which that knowledge is produced. These limits become audible in Temporary Stored (I & II), where noise can be understood as making room for what remains unknown.

The projects Temporary Stored and Temporary Stored II can be considered as attempts to make perceptible what is lost when sounds are detached from their cultural and historical contexts and incorporated into an institutional archive, inviting us to engage with the recordings without assuming that their meanings can be fully recovered or possessed. These projects can also be understood as proposals to acknowledge the limits of representation and of what can be known. In this sense, they propose a different relationship with the archive and suggest the possibility for a more respectful and attentive form of listening, one that remains aware of the limits of what listening can make known.