In 1963–64, Gerd and Sigrid Koch recorded songs and dance chants on twelve reels of tape across three atolls of the southern Gilbert Archipelago – present-day Kiribati. For decades, the more than 220 recordings lay unheard in the sound archive of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. The digitization of the tapes and their accompanying ethnographic documentation made the collection newly accessible and opened the ground for the scholarly engagement this book pursues: close ethnomusicological analysis of songs and dance chants, a systematic account of musical genres in Kiribati, and an assemblage perspective that approaches the collection not as a closed archive, but as an open, mutable configuration of heterogeneous actors, materials, and practices. Two assemblages take center stage. The first reconstructs the formation of the collection as a configuration of distributed agency, drawing on Koch’s field notes, documentation, and correspondence as well as the disregarded spoken passages of selected tapes, untranscribed until now. I-Kiribati actors actively shaped the recording process through performances, repertoire choices, and commentary. The second emerged from consultations held in 2022 in the meeting houses of communities on Onotoa, Nonouti, and Tabiteuea, where members of the source communities reassembled the historical sound documents according to their own criteria. The Nonouti selections presented here reveal strong preferences for identity-marking dance chants alongside significant breaks in the transmission of older chant genres. As far as is currently known, this is one of the oldest collections of field recordings of Kiribati music. It has since been repatriated to the National Museum Te Umwanibong.
Reference
Wolfgang Kempf and Mary Lawson Burke (2026): Tracing Sound Documents: Assemblages of a Tape Collection from Kiribati. Göttingen: Univerlag Göttingen. DOI: https://doi.org/10.17875/gup2026-3076.