Soil Root Leaf

Tonight at 10pm — a powerful new work by Paul Nataraj & Masimba Hwahti in response to Julian ‘Togar’ Abraham’s Soil Root Leaf.

Spanning five years of conversations across continents, this piece weaves migrant stories, memory, and resistance through sound and soil. At its centre: a calico-covered record dyed with mud from Harare, accompanied by field recordings, family prayers, and experimental turntable practices. A deep listening into land, lineage, and the vibrations that connect us.

The basis of this piece is a modified record, which has been covered with calico, dyed with mud collected from a contentious location in Harare where the New Zimbabwe flag was hoisted in 1980. Alongside this ‘earth dipped record’ we hear field recordings of family prayers, onomatopoeic vocalisations, and experimental turntable practices using mediated records. The work remembers stories of myth, music, mantras and math, all rooted in a collective interest in factive, mnesonic practices of resistance and sonic action(s) may you – repeat 108 times. Masimba re-members how in Chidzimbahwe folklore, the soil hums ultra sound songs to the offspring of mice below the surface, subtle vibrational songs that humans cannot hear, songs of healing and comfort. This is part of a terra-ancestral ontology, nomadically sounding material memories, through leaf soil and root.