Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • 3279: Lockheed Vega 5B
    Piece based on Lockheed Vega 5B by Adrian Williams (Things Being Various)
    "I wanted to make a piece that evoked feelings of flight, given the Smithsonian treasure chosen, and to make it light and airy. 
    "I also decided to make it a short piece, to reflect perhaps the take off, or landing of Amelia Earhart's journey. The plane is a long-distance record breaker so rather than make a long piece, I wanted to keep things short."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    2 min
  • 3265: Flights of vengeance
    Piece based on V-1 missile by Richard Watts.
    "The piece is based on an imagined flight of a V1. The white noise and pulse sound are supposed to be the jet engines in flight, with the strings giving a sense of air movement. I've added some off beat melodies that are a bit threatening and the voices are there to give a sense of doom. The drums are the anti-aircraft fire. I've also added a sample of an Adolf Hitler speech to add some context."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    6 min
  • 3276: One Dilla Land
    Piece based on J Dilla's MPC by Adam Hulbert.
    "J Dilla’s MPC 3000 was a portal to another, fresher, place, where nothing was quite as expected. In his hands, machine music was full of life. I’m celebrating his legacy with a back-to-roots boom bap track, which draws on the MPC production style for inspiration. I made this using a serve of cut-up samples from the 1951 Alice in Wonderland animated feature, with a liberal sprinkling of New Zealand studio genius Goldbaby’s percussion hits, which he sampled through various MPCs. Samples were played in directly using an Ableton Live Push 2 with quantising turned off. A touch of post editing in Pro Tools."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    2 min
  • 3277: Phyllosoma
    Piece based on Phyllosoma by Thomas Haighton.
    "This piece was inspired by pictures of different types of phyllosoma by Dr. Martin W. Johnson. Phyllosoma are crustacean larvae but the still look a lot like insects. In the photo’s they where coloured with a green dye which almost gave them an alien look. This inspired my to make the piece dark in mood by using heavy base and distorted tones. This is dark base is contrasted with sound of crashing waves recorded in the ocean. On top of this, tiny grains with snippets of hydrophone recordings and synths dance, simulating the phyllosoma moving between the swell of plankton in the ocean."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    4 min
  • 3279: Lorelei
    Piece based on Lorelei painting by Ursula Bravo.
    "The myth and the perspective represented was the key. That trapped soul in her own curse for being in love, resonating between the rocks, the water, the wind, at the same time can be almost a free spirit. The piece that you can hear is the emerging of the energy of the cursed soul trough a storm, sometimes you can hear her as an animal entity, other you can hear her as the land.
    "All the soundscape come from behind from the scene represented, the moon at the front, the storm at our backs."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    7 min
  • 3283: UMcertain
    Piece based on the Statue of Liberty by Bev Boyd.
    "It moved to me to think about emigration to the United States from the perspectives of two English emigrants and one native New Yorker, whose ancestors fled Europe at the turn of the 20th century.
    "Each voice describes a different aspect of the immigrant experience and it got me thinking how hard it can be for societies, and individuals, to marry their wide ranging notions of liberty, opportunity and identity. To stay or go, to commit to a new world or not, seemed part of all the experiences in the voices you hear in the piece. '  So the word 'um' was what I wanted to highlight. I wanted the feeling of 'um' of hesitancy and uncertainty and conflictedness, to be heard. I felt it deserved recognition. I wanted to give it music.
    "I noticed how these three Americans had all known conflicted feelings in the process of making sense of their own or their families' moves. Ambivalence seemed to be missing in the Emma Lazarus poem, which has the feel of trailblazing optimism.  Trailblazing doesn't always recognise the deliberating and the wondering that may go with wondering whether it was worth it. 'Um' is the word that allows us time to find our way around a sentence as we try to work out the worth of an action, or idea, or to recall our own, or another's, personal history.  So I wanted to highlight the 'um' in the experiences described in my piece.  The word seem to capture a feeling at large in the US today, in relation to immigration.  
    "I mixed in some sounds of traditional American and European instruments - harmonica, mandolin and accordion. The mandolin may sound playful and tentative, because I am finding my way round it, feeling like a new arrival when I try to play it. The first voice in my piece is an English American, living in Denver. The mandolin and harmonica remind me of the bluegrass heritage of that state.
    "The accordion acknowledges Paris, home of Gustave Eiffel who designed part of the Statue of liberty, and recalls the music of the Jews who left Europe for the New World. One speaker in my piece mentions a relative from Transylvania, and I wanted to play the accordion slowly in this piece, because the sound carries a history or horror, both real and cinematic."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    14 min
  • 3299: The airship lament
    Piece based on The Air Ship Waltz by Shaun Malone.
    "Since it was sheet music I immediately wanted to know how it sounded - I could not find the music anywhere online, and trying to play it myself was a very slow process. So I downloaded some software that could scan sheet music to MIDI. The music was corrupted in the process and I decided to work with this and explore how the music sounded with different voices and with different tempos. The resulting piece is 5 minutes long but only represents perhaps 10-12 bars of the original. To add texture I incorporated an unfinished project which was my first attempt at creating an ambient/drone piece."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    6 min
  • 3298: Torn
    Piece based on Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral by Phil Smith.
    "The reason I chose this item from the list of Smithsonian Treasures was, I think, because it looked like something I might instinctively shy away from, or think, "that's not mine to explore." It’s a book of poems, published in 1773, written by Phillis Wheatley, "a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa." The horrific language of that description is from the book’s introduction, in which her "master" addresses the public to confirm that these poems really are the work of his slave.
    I found it an intense and confusing document to engage with, knowing the context of its creation, and even more so as I began to explore the poems. How she crafts iambic pentameter, and brings such richness of sound and image together in her invocations of nature - this really grabbed me (lines like: “And nectar sparkle on the blooming rose.”); but I felt resistance to all the talk of heaven (most of the poems are elegies for the recently-bereaved, called “On The Death Of … ”). There are poems in which she describes her own story as one of salvation - lines like "’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”; alongside other passages, like this one, where she lays out her anger and grief:
    Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,
      Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,
      Whence flow these wishes for the common good,
      By feeling hearts alone best understood,
      I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate
      Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:
      What pangs excruciating must molest,
      What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?
    I am grateful for the invitation to respond to this Smithsonian item. Reading the book of poems made me touch on the sadness and fear that I feel around the implications of my whiteness and my maleness. It made me feel angry about our past, and shameful of - and frustrated by - my complicity in the refusal of some parts of self and society in the UK (and America) to dismantle colonial attitudes and address racist structures, mental and social. I felt drawn to trying to express something of that by using Wheatley’s words.
    "I started by collecting phrases from across the book and reordering and reassembling them into short choruses and mantras. I was drawn to fragments of text around the oft-repeated phrase "on the death of", as well words that refer to existence - "endless", "breath". I noted down lines that, taken out of their original context, seem to address the reader directly: "How soon would you each sigh, each fear dismiss?"
    "InitialIy, I asked a friend in the US to read the extracts, and thought about finding an African-American actor as I feared erasing or misrepresenting Wheatley’s experience and story. But through conversations, and with some time, I realised that I was being evasive, looking to hide behind other people’s voices rather than being up front about the fact that it was my own response to Phillis Wheatley's work.
    "The piece that has emerged is called “Torn”. This word is one Wheatley uses to describe death (the image of a branch ripped from the tree), and it echoes the violence of the transatlantic slave trade in which children were “seiz’d” from their parents. “And sure ’tis mine to be ashamed, and mourn” - I sing this line as a lament, inviting myself to engage with Wheatley's story, acknowledging my positionality as a white British man and the responsibility we all have to learn from the "evils past”. In the middle, Wheatley’s words are heard in celebration of nature - the divinity of mountains and forests; but the idyll is ruptured, sonically, by the returning violence of human brutality - the ripping apart of families and community.
    "This piece is just a response. To understand Wheatley’s world and experience and art is to read her poems. I hope this piece will invite you to do so!"
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    5 min
  • 3273: Blades
    Piece based on Bell 206L-1 LongRanger II "Spirit of Texas" by Ricardo Paraíso Silvestre.
    "I imagine that circumnavigating the world in a helicopter involves moments of extreme concentration, ever present noise and wandering of the mind. I tried to sit inside the cabin and imagine the abstract soundscape that surrounded the crew. The real sounds and the sounds imagined by them throughout their journey and long hours. The helicopter sound is practically the only real world sound used in the piece. The remainder of the sounds were generated as are the sounds generated by machines and imagination."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    7 min
  • 3266: Olii
    Piece based on four pieces of a mouth organ by Joe Pino.
    "Simple tones from the past leaking into the present. Spectral manipulation in Kyma."
    Part of the Smithsonian Treasures project, a collection of new sound works inspired by items from the Smithsonian Museums’ collections - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/smithsonian
    10 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.