Department of Music

Basile Koechlin

CCS (Critical & Comparative Studies)

Biography

Basile Koechlin is a music scholar and producer.

His main research explores the contemporary value of ethnographic sound archives both within and outside the academic realm. Merging academic, museum, and artistic approaches, he works with several academic institutions, such as the British Library (UK), the Africa Museum (Belgium), and the International Library of African Music (South Africa), and frequently collaborates with the artist collective Nyege Nyege (Uganda).

His creative practices involve sound recording, podcast production, festival curation, and filmmaking. His recent works include the album and documentary Buganda Royal Music Revival (2021) addressing the contemporary performance of the traditional court music of the kingdom of Buganda (Uganda). He also produced a podcast for Afropop Worldwide on the artist residency of the Nyege Nyege collective.

He holds a B.A. in Anthropology and Religions History from the University of Neuchâtel (Switzerland) and a M.A. in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. He is currently a PhD candidate in the Critical and Comparative Studies program at the University of Virginia.