Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Ptolomea created by Peggy Nelson.

"Ptolomea is the Third Zone of the Ninth Circle of Hell; those there entombed are "traitors to guests." The Ninth Circle is very near to Satan himself at the center, and is surrounded by a river (some say a lake) of ice. 

"Within, you can hear the souls of the damned bemoaning their fate, with only their faces free of the ice that traps them.  

"I used several field recordings in this piece: mainly voices echoing in an abandoned Iron Age stone hut in Wales, but also ice cracking and squeaking from a late-winter ice storm near Boston, myself stumbling over wet rocks on a cold beach, and echoes of chants from a disused cathedral. 

"Finally, exiting and entering announcements from various subways bracket the piece, as any modern Dante would undoubtedly be taking the underground to Hell. Throughout all there are the implications and traces of guests who, despite their lack of corporeal form, or perhaps because of it, can never leave."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Antenora created by Robert Rowlands (Auraumua).

"Indolent Belaqua, much loved by Beckett, is met in Ante-Purgatory by Dante, and I like to imagine that as an instrument player he sat under his rock with a lute, or guitar.

"My research into treasonable music led me to discover that there was a time when women who killed their husbands could be considered to have commited treason; 

"Husband-murder, in particular however, was seen more as an affront to social hierarchies rather than any one particular person or rank. Killing the patriarch of a household was a threat to the social order—akin to disobedience against a feudal lord or the monarch—and the delicate balance of power and gender roles that governed early modern England, as strengthened by Protestant doctrine: “if any servant kill his Master, any woman kill her husband, or any secular or religious person kill his Prelate to whom he owes Obedience, this is treason.”(1) Special legal status thus existed for husband murderers, and they were subjected to the same punishment as those convicted of high treason. (2)"

"With this in mind I reasoned that they may have found themselves condemned to an eternity in Antenora (traitors to country), rather than Caina (traitors to kindred). A popular (and lost) melody at the time was that of  Bragandary to which tales of 'evil and wrongdoing' were set. 

"I found another 16th century melody which is said to be similar to Bragandary, called 'Robin and Jeck', and it is fragments of this melody, idly played by Belaqua, which echo in the wind of my piece. I would hope that people might reflect on the battle for an equality of justice and rights that women are still fighting for at this very moment when they consider the background to the melody that haunts the piece; not an eternity, but a life of anguish.

"The soundtrack was created from manipulated sound recordings of ice that I made some years ago; walking on ice, sliding pieces of ice along the fragile surface of ponds and lakes, and breaking up pieces of ice in the wind. Other sounds were produced in the Supercollider coding environment as I needed them. I played the lute melody on guitar, and moans and wailing were captured in the studio."

(1) William Rastall, A Collection in English of the Statutes Now in Force (London: Printed for the Societie of Stationers, 1603), 460.b.

(2) Sarah F. Williams. Damnable Practises: Witches, Dangerous Women, and Music in Seventeenth-Century English Broadside Ballads. Seventeenth-Century News. 2016;74(1-2):41.

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Antenora created by Rafael Valencia.

"Walk with me and admire the musk: all those bodies laying there, frozen, suffering, waiting forever. 

"Walk with me, I'll show you all these traitors, you'll see how they're languishing, how they'll agonize forever, moaning forever. Their homelands executed them and here you are, the spectator. "

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Traitors to guests created by Joseph Chaves.

Down in this cistern employs two sources: Rafael Gamo’s voice reading from the 33rd canto of Dante’s Inferno and a kind of ‘wind’ sound derived from an analogue noise generator. The principle of composition for this piece is, first, to produce the sound of a section of the Canto, and then to loop the voice, working towards ever smaller units of sound. 

The improvisation takes place in two successive modes. First, during repeating loops of a section, the sampler drifts towards phrases and snippets of text that I wish to interrogate or emphasize. So the piece performs a very elementary kind of literary interpretation (quotation, selection, stress). While I seek to render this transition musical, I’m also simply ‘feeling in the dark’ to locate certain specific phrases within the sample. Second, however, I seek to tighten the loops beyond the unit of the phrase and even the word, so that the voice remains identifiable as such, but conveys less and less semantic information. Finally, as the loops eventually shrink towards “microsound,” the sound often becomes less identifiable as voice. This manipulation of the voice takes place against repeated washes of noise, which I vary slightly to accommodate the evolving patterns of the voice. As I make clear below, the noise broadly represents an identifiable sound—a source of “wind” or “vapors” that emanates from the bottom of the pit of hell—although its degree of realism varies quite widely. 

The suite’s movement among listening modes accords with and comments on the particular ring of hell to which Dante assigns traitors to guests—those who abuse the responsibilities and privileges of the host, in order to do ill. These souls of these particular sinners, one explains to Dante, come to hell before their bodies appear dead on earth. (As a quoted passage explains, devils maintain the appearance of life by animating the body.) The musical improvisations all play with this problematic of real and fake, living and dead, here and not-here. They do so first of all in the very nature of the sounds: rather than a recording of wind, for example, the piece simulates wind through the manipulation of noise—sometimes with a fair bit of verisimilitude, sometimes not.  Conversely, the human voice at first encourages us to follow its linguistic meaning, but often is manipulated in such ways as to appear as an inchoate voice, or not a voice at all. 

Even my focusing in on particular phrases foregrounds the ways that the poetry itself echoes the themes of dislocation, the truth and falsity of sensation, and equivocal modes of being. In one passage, for example, Dante asks Virgil where the wind comes from; Virgil puts him off, suggesting that Dante wait until he not only hears the sound but can see its source with his “own eye.” Indeed, it will be revealed later that the ‘wind’ emanates from the flapping of the leathern wings of Satan. As can be seen from the passages I quote below, the piece addresses several different ways that the Canto takes up these themes.

Also, the circumstance of the piece’s performance and recording recapitulates the setting, theme, and form of Canto 33. The suite was recorded during a session of a few hours at The Tank Center for Sonic Arts in Rangely, Colorado. The Tank echoes the shape and therefore the resonant and reverberant qualities of Dante’s hell, which in this Canto Dante refers to as a “cisterna.” (The Tank is indeed an empty cistern.) While the sonic characteristics of the space foreground for the listener that the piece was made in a particular kind of setting, the piece also when through much after-the-fact editing. While editing was limited to cuts, pastes, fade-ins, and fade-outs, I was careful to leave in some of the artifacts of editing, so that the listener is pulled back and forth between absorption in the piece’s putative ‘setting’ and dislocation from that setting.  

Each “section” of the suite employs a series of lines selected from Canto 33. Each time, the sample plays first all the way through the section of the Canto that it will use. During repeating loops of this section, the sampler drifts towards phrases and snippets of text that it seems to find interesting. (This is partly dramaturgy—the sampler is ‘directed’ very precisely by me—and partly what’s really happening. Sometimes, that is, the sampler seeks out a particular passage through mechanical, random procedures.) 

Synthesizer & Sampler: Joseph Chaves

Voice: Rafael Gamo

Engineers: Michael Van Wagoner & Samantha Wade

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Traitors to country created by Neil Verma.

"For this piece I made an experimental audiobook with dialogue structured around bespoke field recordings, foley and archival audio. My inspiration was to create a composition that both vocalized and commented on the text, using one voice to “gnaw” on another, just like the central image of the section in which Count Ugolino gnaws on the head of Archbishop Ruggieri. During research, I became interested in vocal fragments that suggest the inability to speak, and these sounds also became part of the work.

"I built the background with the following components: contact mic recordings of wire fences near Spittal of Glenshee in Scotland; stereo recordings of winds in the Caledonian forest in Scotland; ice on Lake Michigan ice near Chicago during the “polar vortex” freeze of 2019; a summer soundscape at Death’s Door Bluff in Wisconsin; maggots eating the brain of a dead goat in Ireland near Kilfinane; Canyon recordings at Starved Rock State Park, Illinois; and archival audio of breaks during the congressional Iran-Contra hearings, 1987.

"The performers in the piece are Cristina Marras, who read the original Italian text in the first section, Prof. William West of Northwestern University who commented on a translation of the original text by Allen Mandelbaum, Lawrence Grimm, who performed Ugolino’s monologue based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation, and Ele Matelan, who performed all the foley work. I made the field recordings myself, and did the mixing and mastering."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Traitors to guests created by Bev Boyd.

" In this piece about the 9th circle of hell, Zone 37,  we encounter the terror of the inanimate souls of the underworld, whose grief can only turn inward as the tears freeze in the rims of their eyes. 

"Sue, a pensioner in her 70s, describes the pain she suffered when she developed Dry Eye Syndrome and the her frustration at changes to her prescribed medication. Her words intersperse lines from Cantos 32-34. I was drawn to descriptions in the text that referenced glass, crystals and a frozen lake. Their  jagged characteristics seemed to echo the sensations she suffered every day before finding treatment. Sue says she's not used to being asked for her experiences or point of view so I felt she knew something of the suspended voiceless beings in the text, and I hoped that came through.

"Sue's words weave in and out of readings of Dante's text and include some of our warm-up for the recording, in which we look at shapes made by the ice in her freezer tray. I felt it captured her sense of being a bit frozen and the two of us chipping away together.  Sounds you'll hear include the humming of a home freezer and ice crystals creaking on frozen vegetable packs as well as ice cubes which I knocked and stretched (before and during  editing). A bottle rolls on ice  with nowhere to go. They all seemed to have a place in Zone 37 as well as the life of Sue as she negotiates her changed medication with the pharmacist.

I added some notes and strums from my ukulele in E flat minor after finding it was traditionally felt to be the key which captured the soul's darkest despair; that if ghosts could speak, they would speak in E flat minor."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Traitors to kindred created by BMH.

"The Din, the din is omnipresent... We wanted to capture the absolute torture of the crimes against kindred. Lake Cocytus is the frozen lake on the lowest circle of hell. 

"We wanted to encapsulate the sound of being stuck at the bottom frozen from the neck down in ice with incessant everlasting noise. We generated wind using a Dreadbox Medusa, wrote a poem when drunk after a game of cricket, recorded glossolalic cries down a 2 metre cardboard tube with a microphone at the end of it and pushed a whole lot of tremolo through in post production to mimic the reverb and echo spinning round and round the lake for ever more. 

"For ever. The Din is for ever. Think twice."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Traitors to country created by William McKenna.

"Besides the original music bed, there are a variety of sounds in this project: found sounds, manipulated sounds and some that are accidental digital glitches. There are also random sounds that I recorded in my journey around the city which I pulled from my own personal archives, i.e., the music-like sounds which appear near the end that may seem like unschooled, discordant saxophone attacks. I like to think that those unexpected, mechanical, squealing horns - split left and right - pay tribute to some of my favourite free jazz saxophonists.

"One track that you hear throughout is the sound of cicadas screeching above my park bench one day this summer. I slowed the noise down to 25% speed which created a lovely, sort of wind swept, frozen-like atmosphere. I faded that sound in slowly at first, pushed it slightly louder in the mix and then cut it abruptly at the end.

"I spent considerably more time thinking about the project then producing the track which seems to be how I often approach creative work. I didn't know how I was going to structure this piece but I did know that it was definitely going to end with Lucifer's large, bat-like wings flapping to chill the ice of Cocytus.

"Trying to create something that echoes Dante's journey in that part of the Ninth Circle of Hell was challenging. "Frozen Core" is my attempt to sonically interpret the horror."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Traitors to kindred created by Laura Lair.

"I chose to depict the ‘Traitors to kindred’ segment of hell which is found in Circle 9, the Circle of Treachery, the deepest level of hell.

"It is described by Dante as a lake of ice that traps the traitors, betrayers and oathbreakers in the ice, beyond the light or warmth of the sun (the Son). Those who are traitors to their kindred are in the first round (ring) and have their heads and necks out of the ice. 

"In my imagining, the ice lake is in a giant ice cavern. The sounds of screams, shouts and moans from the trapped traitors can be heard in the distance through the wind that rages throughout the icy hellscape. There is a lot of different reverbs in my piece so the sounds of the voices and ice cracking reflect strangely like they do when bouncing off ice. You can also hear a disembodied voice that haunts the traitors throughout their days."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno

Lucifer in Hell created by Alan Bleay.

"The piece is based around the theme of Satan. I tried to create a small journey of Satan through the Inferno with a nod to the traditional musical view of Hell."

Part of the Inferno project to imagine and compose the sounds of Dante’s Hell, marking the 700th anniversary of The Divine Comedy. To find out more, visit http://www.citiesandmemory.com/inferno