The Oldenburg ultras choir

"I asked for a random field recording to let chance guide my ear. What arrived resonated: unmistakably urban, shaped by the pulse of a collective ritual. In the voices of the Vfb Oldenburg Ultras chants I heard an expression of joy and working-class culture, a liturgy sung by a secular choir. Lower division football provides an inclusive space where local cultural identity and community can be celebrated. The glamour needs to be homegrown on a wet midweek evening, when your team is losing (again). This sense of community is often more inspiring than the display on the pitch. It also helped that they share the blue and white stripes of my own club.

"The piece draws solely from the original recording, its sounds stretched and looped across four tapes, long and short fragments circling one another. Overdrive, echo, resonators, and reverb shape the texture, sharpening some edges, dissolving others to emphasise and blend. I let the voices and rhythms guide the process, leaving them ‘visible’ throughout, figures present in the fog. Their call and response summoned memories of Bali’s Kecak — the chant’s spiralling energy, its collective breath — while the martial drumming beneath it all became the spine of the beat. Everything is distorted as it should be."

Oldenburg FC vs. Luebeck match reimagined by smithdarg.