What is the sound of memory? How do we listen to memory in its multitude – to histories? The sound of history is ephemeral. And yet it persists.

Electronic music, piano, lecture performance: in sonus ‒ the sound within us the performance artist and sound scholar meLê yamomo invites us as an audience to immerse ourselves in the sentimentality of his childhood hometown and the soundtrack of his youth. He links his story with the history of imperialism, post-colonial nationalism and the migration of musicians rendered subaltern. He directs our ears to listen closely to the permeation of individual memory and translocal histories. He invites us to follow the echo of a globalized history and the accompanying migration of sound and its multiple repositionings.

Drawing on some thoughts in his last book, Sounding Modernities, onstage meLê yamomo reflects about the colonized bodies as an archive of sound memory and histories. To this end, he speaks about his journeys, his encounters with post-migrant artists and academics, about the sound that is archived in colonized bodies. And he presents sound. For it is precisely the ephemerality of sound and the transience of vocal expression, the sounding longing of Filipino immigrants in Europe in music and language, that evokes memory and demonstrates the everyday relevance and political, often resistant force of the body archive.

After his performance Echoing Europe ‒ postcolonial reverberations in collaboration with Pepe Dayaw, sonus ‒ the sound within us is the second production by the performance artist and sound scholar meLê yamomo at Ballhaus Naunynstraße.