The late broadcaster's lifelong mission to subject the British public to sounds they fundamentally resisted reached its zenith when he realized artillery fire was simply the ultimate field recording. His death at 66 marks the end of an era of compulsory auditory expansion.
The passing of Andy Kershaw at the age of sixty-six deprives the BBC of its most relentless curator of acoustic endurance; he was a man who understood that the polite British listening public required regular, non-consensual exposure to the unfamiliar. One is reminded of the early wax cylinder recordings of the Bororo people, the canonical descent into the underworld in Dante’s Inferno, and the 1994 compilation album Now That’s What I Call Music! 29. It cannot be coincidence that a broadcaster who built his reputation unearthing impenetrable rhythmic traditions in distant nations eventually found his ultimate muse in the visceral, unproduced acoustics of active combat zones.
The pivot from playing unfiltered Tuvan throat singing to broadcasting live mortar barrages from Kigali was a natural evolution of our mandate to provide sounds the audience actively did not want to hear.
To the untrained ear, Kershaw’s sudden departure from championing obscure Malian guitarists to documenting the collapse of civil society might appear jarring, yet the cultural continuity is undeniable. Both endeavors demanded a man willing to venture into places entirely devoid of British pop sensibilities, equipped with nothing but a microphone and a profound determination to educate the Home Counties whether they desired the instruction or not.