Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

By Cities and MemorySociety & CultureArtsMusicPlaces & Travel
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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • Hauntología - noche y hum
    Uzbekistan Khiva Star hotel sounds reimagined by Martha Riva Palacio Obón.

    "Night is a liminal spacetime where, paraphrasing Salomé Voegelin, different rhythms and beings converge creating simultaneously many possible worlds. 

    "In this brief aural essay, I bring forward the background sounds in the field recording and mix them with a hybrid chorus of human and insect voices. The mechanic hum is replaced with the reverberation of wine glasses. 

    "The main structure of this piece is built from two tracks that run in different directions: backwards and forwards. 

    "Past, present, future: I evoke the memory of many nights spent alone and with company. A cacophony that flows into silence. Nocturnal disjunctures and entanglements, every ghost requires a translation."
    3 min
  • Klein Karoo nature reserve
    Klein Karoo nature reserve, South Africa, recorded by restive.

    "Field recording made on a recent trip to the Klein Karoo near Ladismith. This was recorded during the day; you can hear the sound of a tractor plowing a field, workers in the fields, water rushing down an irrigation furrow, various bird and frog calls, the occasional car passing on the road."
    22 min
  • Jungle
    Laos forest sounds reimagined by Martin Juenke.

    "I took the recording, cleaned and streamlined it, pitched it down a bit to avoid harshness and fatiguing highs and stretched it to an appropriate length. 

    "Then I added kind of Berlin School arpeggios and harmonies, a layer of pulsing tones and other stuff to create a rich, calm, flowing atmosphere."
    4 min
  • Forest and birds, Laos
    Recording from a forest near Luang Prabang, Laos, recorded by Manuel Oberkalmsteiner.

    "Birds singing in the forest somewhere in the nowhere."
    2 min
  • Holyland 2019
    Petra traditional flute music reimagined by Nigel Lloyd.

    "The reimagined piece is built from a few recordings taken on a trip to Jordan and Israel in 2019. The recordings were mostly from Petra in Jordan during a sound and light show where a man was playing a traditional piece of flute music.

    "On the long walk down to the building in the accompanying photograph there was an atmospheric drone echoing through the cleft in the mountain called the Siq. In the piece you can also hear some chattering sparrows and a recording of people at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem."
    3 min
  • Traditional music from the Rose City
    Field recording from the famous archaeological site at Petra, Jordan (otherwise known as The Rose City due to its pink sandstone cliffs), during a sound and light show featuring pieces of traditional flute music.

    Recorded by Nigel Lloyd. 
    1 min
  • Aliens for tennis?
    Pyramid of Tirana reimagined by Museleon.

    "What things do you think of as summer?

    "Sun, sea, sandcastles, ice creams melting, strawberries and cream and aliens enjoying a competitive game of tennis at Wimbledon…

    "Hang on there... aliens at Wimbledon?

    "Starting with the field recording from the Pyramid of Tirana, I heard a tiny sample of what seemed like cutlery or metal clanging, that when looped sounded like a game of ping pong. This became the rhythmic basis of the whole track. 

    "Like most of my tracks they go through metamorphoses during development, and a ping pong match became something bigger in scale when I came across a field recording of a tennis match on Freesound - Tennis Match by Huubjeroen (licensed under Creative Commons 0  https://freesound.org/people/huubjeroen/sounds/114052).

    " edited the match down and rearranged it into a shorter length and then took several samples from the Tirana sound file to create the rallies and ball sounds. I did not process the samples at all, as I liked the sounds of the metal clanging and banging and so it sounds as if the players are using large metal ladles to play the match.

    "The final idea of my track came from the group of alien monsters I have sitting on top of my studio speakers …small rubber ones... and my imagination ran riot as I thought it would be fun to imagine them having a game of tennis. The MIDI information from the field recordings was used as a basis for synths, to create alien type sounds. For the full effect the track is best listened through headphones.

    "Aliens for tennis, anyone?"
    4 min
  • Kalaw shuffle
    Burmese monk singing reimagined by Geraint Rhys.

    "Inspired by the project's title 'remix the world' I didn't want to confine myself to a particular genre, so when I chose this clip I picked it because there was a clear rhythmic musicality to it and allowed that to lead the way. 

    "I then built the piece around these vocal rhythms allowing it to develop into something which takes in elements of house, techno, chill and even added some horns too. 

    "Although the clip clearly has a spatial origin, which is Myanmar, rather than create a piece that is cemented in one place, through using the various genres of it allows the piece to be multi-spatial. "
    3 min

About Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world.