Cities and Memory - remixing the world

In late December, the Christmas season in Venice is in full flow. Mass bells peal out in a backstreet next to the excellent Marco Polo bookshop in the Dorsoduro district, with occasional passing footsteps ringing out into the crisp evening air.

Recorded in December 2025 by Cities and Memory. 

Aboard the Oslo inner fjord ferry from Lindoya island to Gressholmen, with engine sounds and Norwegian announcements. 

Recorded in September 2025 by Cities and Memory. 

"I used recordings from Norwegian ferry and ferries in Bainbridge Island and the San Juan Islands. I have been in love with ferries and the sea since childhood. I used harmonics from wind sound through metal guardrails in boat for base harmonies and synthesizers to build in these harmonies and accentuate movement on the water and the cabin of the ferry."

Grssholmen ferry, Oslo reimagined by Robert Dansby.

"Quartet is composed of the City of Venice and its mass bells from the original field recording. Memory rises not only of the Sea that surrounds me on the island where I live, but also of visiting Venice; the sound of water, church bells mingled here with the Bells of the island and my overlapping Memory of playing piano from an early age."

Bells in Venice reimagined by Steph Shipley.

I usually play jazz piano, but on this particular day I was camping with my family — my wife, our two-year-old son, and our two medium-sized Japanese dogs. When I woke up, the scenery and the birdsong were so beautiful that I felt compelled to record the soundscape, and I naturally began playing piano along with it.

Birdsong in Suwa District, Japan reimagined by Daisuke Matsubara.

This sound is the call of a bird we heard while camping with our family in the morning.
It comes from a region that is usually covered in snow, but this was recorded during the pleasant climate of May in Japan.

Recorded by Daisuke Matsubara.

"There are so many extraordinary moments in Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary, Shoah but it’s the interviews with the railway workers and the train drivers that helped facilitate the horrors of the holocaust (some of them still working those same lines when the movie was made in the 70’s and 80’s) and those with the farmers and local people who bore witness to the trains that have the most impact. The sheer matter-of-factness of their recounting; the lack of compassion, the smiles and shoulder shrugging. The banality of genocide. 

"After I’d watched Shoah, I felt as though something inside of me had been broken. From childhood I had grown up with the idea of this as the worst of human crimes, the word holocaust, alone, meant to pause for breath. Now here was the shock of seeing people involved with and witness to it writing it off as just another thing that happened in the course of a day of work. It was a shock, though, that came accompanied by an uncomfortable realisation that of course that’s how it was: for evil to be committed on such a huge scale it couldn’t have been any other way.

"The ‘Final Solution’ was a railway operation run to a timetable. It was: mechanics, logistics, coke and steam. Wagoning, shunting, shovelling and coaling. Rubber stamps and forms in triplicate. Cold, logical, every day planning. 

"I used locomotive sounds and looped them.

"There’s a legend that there are no birds at Auschwitz but I imagined gazing up high and longing to escape. I have also read about how the inmates began to see the contrails of the American bombers late in the war. I can’t imagine what that must have meant to them. I can’t imagine how much hope they still held onto after everything that they had experienced. 

"I imagined a folk song, sang it and then reprised its melody like a memory of the singer gone.

"In his book The Truce, Primo Levi recounts that the very worst thing said to the inmates by the camp guards was that even if by a miracle some of them survived the camp it wouldn’t matter, because the perpetrators were going to destroy all of the evidence and hide it all from the world and nobody that the survivors tried to tell about it would ever believe any of it was true.

"It is the duty of every one of us as human beings to make sure that that prophecy is never allowed to come to pass."

Birkenau Gate, Auschwitz soundscape reimagined by Jon Griffin.

"The source sound is open to interpretation but to me it sounds like I'm in the woods. I used a quote from Dante’s Inferno in it as spoken word whilst maintaining the original source sound in the background. It's about expecting things that should be in place by midlife but the realisation they're not; you’re lost in the woods (metaphorically); there are many paths to go by, and what one might think and hope is permanent is not. 

"All things are temporary and transitory in nature, and the realisation of that (usually in mid to late life) is something we all face, whether it be bereavment or failed relationships/friendships for example. I have personally felt this way many times - like I’m lost in the woods. I decided to shift to a more dubstep genre, which represents moments of anger & frustration amidst the quieter sections, which are more contemplative. "

Dawn chorus in Antipolo City, Philippines reimagined by Jaspal Bhogal.

"The feel of the song was inspired by the slow joy of the ambient sounds in the field recording, and the rhythmic sound of the waves. Praia Vermelha is at the base of Sugarloaf Mountain, and after researching the place, it also became important to the song. 

"The lyrics include a line about Henrietta Carstairs, the first known person to climb the mountain in 1817. The field recording continues throughout, connecting the present moment with the history of the area and all the mountain has seen."

Praia Vermelha, Rio de Janeiro reimagined by Sairie.