Franz Kirmann: On “Almadies” and mind-constructed geographies.

But what perhaps inspired me the most was the title of his 1980 album with Brian Eno: Fourth World, Vol. 1: Possible Musics. That title led me to think about the idea of music for places that don’t really exist — imagined countries, or geographies, in my case, shaped entirely by personal memory.

I realised that the Senegal of my childhood no longer exists in that form. What I carry with me is a very personal, idealised vision of it, shaped by childhood naivety and by not yet being aware of the country’s social and political realities. As a child, it was simply my world: a beautiful place, a friendly environment, a happy time to grow up in.

When I returned there in the early 2000s to work, I experienced it very differently. I was older, more aware, and more embedded in the everyday life of Senegal. I saw things I couldn’t have seen as a child, both literally and emotionally. It became clear to me that this wasn’t a correction of the earlier memory, but an entirely different place altogether. The location hadn’t changed as much as my point of view had.

That shift became central to the album: the idea that a place can exist primarily as a personal construction, something that doesn’t fully correspond to reality. I started asking myself how that could be expressed through music. This is where field recordings became important.

I began blending recordings from very different locations: the sound of rain; the Atlantic Ocean recorded near Almadies in Dakar in 2015; wildlife recorded during a trip to the Caribbean; as well as everyday sounds from my life in London — waiting in the rain outside my child’s school — or recordings made while visiting my family in France, capturing rain against the windows.

These real-world sounds were then merged with the synthetic material I was creating. Through granular processing, the synthesisers themselves began to take on watery, windy, rain-like qualities, blurring the distinction between natural and artificial sound. Together, these elements formed an abstract sonic world — part documentary, part imagined — where memory, place, and invention coexist.

Here are some examples:

1 – La Pointe des Almadies

This piece starts with a recording of the Atlantic Ocean I made near La Pointe des Almadies in Dakar back in 2015. The second recording here is made from a synthesiser part processed by a granular effect, which deconstructs the sound into grains and adds to the water/waves effect of the real sound.

2 – Retba

This piece starts with a recording I made in a garden in Barbados a few years ago, early in the morning. The second recording is made with an instrument called the Buchla Easel, which is a semi-modular synthesiser that makes use of cross-modulation and what is called a low-pass gate. That design is very good at creating organic, percussion-like sounds that feel very realistic.

Extract 3

Extract 4

3 – L’île

Here I’m using a recording of the same Barbados garden, but at night; you can hear all the crickets singing. The Buchla is also used here, but random modulation of the oscillator’s pitch at a very high rate gives a sound close to birds. The synth comes with a built-in spring reverb, which is very useful for creating a background sound akin to a drone and giving space to my “birds”.

Franz Kirmann’s Almadies is out now on Bytes