Member Article

Rainforest World Music Festival Living Archive Celebration

A musical collaboration between 16 creatives across 5 different countries on an innovative cloud-based platform founded in the North East of England has been celebrated at this year’s Rainforest World Music Festival.

Borneo Bengkel, a pan-Borneo platform that works with creatives across the globe, brought musicians together in 2021 on the Living Archive cloud-based platform, to showcase, collaborate and inspire musicians from the United Kingdom, Indonesia and Malaysia.

These musicians collaborated remotely, exchanging digital files to create a stunning collection of sound, music and endangered languages which they wanted to share with the world.

Using Living Archive, which makes collaborating, uploading, organising, curating and exhibiting digital multi-media content easy, Borneo Bengkel opened up entirely new channels of engagement to showcase the work, which they have called Soundbank, connecting with communities and stakeholders across the globe.

And now the creation which explores the theme “Divided By Lockdowns and Borders, Can We Still Connect Digitally Across Oceans Through Sound?” has been hugely celebrated by being performed at the 2022 Rainforest World Music Festival. The festival celebrated it’s 25th anniversary with its first hybrid event. Themed “Legendary Rainforest Celebration”, the physical concert took part at Sarawak Cultural Village, whilst viewers livestreamed it into their own homes, enabling Borneo Bengkal’s Soundbank to reach millions of people.

Soundbank, is now an established digital archive and play space of music, visuals and found sound. Living Archive founder Nick John Williams is delighted with the success of Soundbank. He said:

“The opportunity to be programmed at this high profile, international music festival was made possible because Borneo Bengkel shared their Soundbank project with the programmers of the festival using their Living Archive as a portfolio. This is a perfect example demonstrating how a Living Archive can be leveraged to create further (incredible) opportunities for your organisation.”

Nick went on to congratulate the curator of the project, Catriona Maddocks. She said:

“The Soundbank project came from the realisation that even though we are so separated from each other, the digital world and Living Archive gives the means and opportunity to connect with people from distant places to create together. We are very excited to have the opportunity to continue to bring people together to collaborate in an innovative way via this amazing platform and to receive recognition at this amazing musical celebration was the icing on the cake.”

Soundbank brings together musicians exploring folk music with a contemporary twist. The recordings include over five endangered indigenous languages such as Scottish Gaelic, alongside Dusun and Kayan from Borneo. It is supported by the British Council’s Connections Through Culture grant.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Anna Toms .