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Sound Lines

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Verity Sharp connects musical stories along latitudinal lines around the globe.

Sound Lines: Series 1

Sound Lines: Series 1: Equator

Equator

18/09/2018

Series 1

BBC Radio 4 - Sound Lines, Series 1, Equator

The second in a series in which Verity Sharp connects musical stories along latitudinal lines around the globe, visiting the Ecuadorean Andes, Indonesia, and Kenya.

Music broadcaster Verity Sharp listens to music along latitudinal lines, hearing local stories that are having a direct impact on music and musicians. Could there be echoes along these sound lines? Might music that's created thousands of miles apart, but on the same latitude, share common ground? Does listening in this way allow us to glimpse the effect of the vast and often immeasurable forces that are sweeping change across our planet?

This second episode circumnavigates the globe along the Equator, described by Aristotle as "the torrid zone", a place where the planet's centrifugal forces are at their most powerful, dictating the direction of weather systems and ocean currents.

Around the circle, we hear three stories.

Writer and musician Daniel Lofredo Rota takes us 2,500 metres up into the Andes in Ecuador, home to harp and flute player Jesús Bonilla and his fellow Kichwa community, who are struggling against visible effects of climate change and the erosion of their way of life.

Rully Shabara is immersed in an intense sonic world - not only in the experimental vocal music he creates, but the relentless noise of street-life in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

And Gregg Mwendwa visits the Kenyan city of Kisumu. Musician Olith Ratego is a member of the Luo people whose lives there are entwined with Lake Victoria, an ecosystem in which one arrival has had a drastic effect.


Producer: Chris Elcombe
A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 4.

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