Cities and Memory - remixing the world

The original field recording was fed into a granular sculpting sampler to create bell like arpeggiated lines. Next, I chopped the field recording to extract key parts, intimate vocal moments, a solid stone hit rhythm and laughter. Isolated stone “hits” became drum parts, replayed and resampled then slowed. 

They began to sound like ghost drums, closing doors or belated fireworks. I recreated the rhythms, striking flints collected from Norfolk beaches and in a simple act connected across time for a moment, integrating them into the final track. I played modular synth parts, stereo panned over the recording, adding high tones and static improvised, sonic scribble. 

The final completed track has a dream like quality with a foggy, lost ambient crackle and haze. Voices drift in and out of the track, there is laughter as stones are struck and connect us through time.

Women and grinding stones reimagined by Andy Billington.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Silenced Soil begins with a fragile artefact: a recording of Claude Debussy’s Sarabande, composed in 1894 and revised in 1901, then recorded on 11 April 1963 in Gillitts, KwaZulu-Natal, by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen. Its only documentation is a handwritten note on a reel-to-reel tape box: “at Gillitt’s, copy of Debussy, Sarabande.” No pianist, no studio, no context. The archive offers little clarity. Sometimes it keeps its silence.

Listening to this recording in 2025, I was confronted not only by sound, but by history. Why was Western art music recorded here, under whose authority, and for what purpose, during a period still shaped by colonial power? Before reshaping the music, I had to confront my own position as a descendant of European colonisers. This inherited legacy uncomfortable but necessary became central to the work, sharpening my awareness of cultural imposition, culture colonialism and ongoing calls for restitution.

From this reckoning, Silenced Soil emerged. I treated Debussy’s melody as a fractured map: splintered, dispersed, and reassembled through chance. This approach draws on John Cage’s embrace of indeterminacy and my long-standing admiration for atonality in music. 

The soundscape is composed at 120 BPM (2 Hz), chosen to evoke both calm and alertness. A reflection of historical time moving slowly, yet demanding urgent re-examination. Within this framework, I wove voices and instruments from Zulu culture, women’s singing sound fragments, mouth harps, clapping sticks, and rattles — alongside electronics, loops, found sounds, urban noise, and synthesised textures and the original recording of Sarabande. I actively intervened in this source material, editing the refrain of Sarabande into fragmentary notes and embedding them within the soundscape composition. 

These elements meet not as opposites but as interlocutors, forming a threshold where suppressed traditions and contemporary sound worlds converge.

Unanswered questions remain: Who was the pianist? Who authorised the recording? What ethical framework governed it? These absences are integral to Silenced Soil. What is unheard can be as powerful as what is recorded. And the soil? It stands for the restless cosmos, for the sand forever in motion across our planet. What drifts, what scatters, what is buried will, in time, be made visible. 

My compositional process is guided by intuition and curiosity; notation and atonality serve as a compass rather than a rule, supported here by research into the subject itself. 

My aural journey began at six at the piano, expanded through Germany’s 1990s DJ culture, deepened during my years as a contracted composer with BMG, and refined through studies in Sound & Visual Art at Middlesex University’s Lansdowne Centre for Electronic Arts. Together, these experiences shape a practice that moves fluidly between structure and instinct, inquiry and an enduring love for soundscape creation.

Piano being played reimagined by Linda Himbert.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Weaving song from the Gower Peninsula of South Wales, recited by Thomas Penniman, former Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, who was preparing a manuscript on 'Work and Song in the North-west Gower' in his retirement ("Mrs. Tanner had six sons, and they all sang like thrushes while they worked at the loom").

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being one of a number of miscellaneous individual recordings (rediscovered during a recent research project).

Recorded by Robert P. Rivers and Kenneth Henry Walters.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Women singing and using grinding stones for musical accompaniment.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of cassette tape recordings of music and spoken language (principally Laarim) made by anthropologist Patti Langton in South Sudan during 1979 and 1980.

Recorded by Patti Langton.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

"Piano being played": recording of the second movement ('Sarabande') of solo piano suite 'Pour le piano' (L.95) by French composer Claude Debussy, performed by an unnamed pianist.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen mainly in Vanuatu (and South Africa) between 1960 and 1979.

Recorded by Raymond Ernst Clausen.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

This piece is built around a short fragment of an Igbo wind instrument recording taken from the Pitt Rivers Museum sound collections. The original recording was made on wax cylinder by anthropologist Northcote Thomas in Nigeria between 1909 and 1915. Knowing the material fragility of the recording, and the historical distance it represents, strongly shaped how I approached the composition.

Rather than treating the field recording as documentary material, I focused on its breath, tone, and repetition. I isolated a small loop from the wind instrument and gently pitch-shifted it, allowing the sound to move away from its original temporal context and into something more meditative and suspended. The looping process emphasises continuity and endurance, while also acknowledging the artificiality of repetition imposed by modern technology.

The looped wind instrument is paired with a simple, evoking kalimba part, chosen for its percussive softness and cyclical nature. Together, the sounds create a quiet dialogue between archival breath and contemporary interpretation, exploring how historical recordings can be re-heard as living material rather than fixed artefacts.

Igbo wind instrument reimagined by Andy Truscott.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of songs and spoken language made by anthropologist Northcote Thomas in Nigeria and Sierra Leone between 1909 and 1915.

Recorded by Northcote Whitridge Thomas.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

The inspiration for this piece was the current climate and attitudes from a section of the population towards immigration. It is unsettling to see the resurgence en masse of sentiments I thought were well behind us. I used a fragment of a field recording from the Bamam tribe of Cameroon, and used it as an intro for my piece, which I divided into three movements.

a) Mar Germanicus
It uses an Arabic mode (maqam) called Kurd. It represents longing, mirroring the thoughts of the dinghy's occupants, shunted in the unknown (like the ancient Romans might have viewed the North Sea) with only their fears for company.

b) Dover
It employs an Arabic maqam called Rast. It represents vigour, strength, courage, all qualities the dinghy's occupants need to summon in view of approaching the English coast.

c) Dark Duende
It appropriates a flamenco idiom, a form (Palo) called Tientos. A coda that stresses arrival, the end of the journey, a new uncertain beginning, and my homage to an ethnic group that saw and sees its fair share of prejudice: the Gitanos (Spanish Roma).

The recording is purposefully rough, unclean, even containing missteps and falls, entirely acoustic, no electric instruments, with echoes from blues and bluegrass, like a melting pot that is the eternal benefit of immigration.

I used all vintage instruments;
- a 1970 Moroccan oud, double tracked.
- an acoustic bass
- a 1950s Framus acoustic guitar played
 with a brass slide
- an African ceramic drum
- a tambourine
- handclaps recorded on 6 tracks 
- a 1970s Flamenco guitar

My everlasting thanks to my wife Mary, who took care of our three kids while I was thinking, pondering, arranging, playing, rehearsing, recording and improving my piece.

Bamum zither player reimagined by Giorgio Curcetti.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of songs and musical instruments made by journalist Lois Mitchison in Cameroon during 1958.

Recorded by Sonja Lois Mitchison.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

YAZ is a vocal and electroacoustic composition built from a field recording of an Aït Haddidou market in Rabat, captured in 1961. What struck me immediately was the presence of a young boy’s voice, cutting through the density of the market: a call. Not directed at anyone in particular, yet lingering. That voice became the starting point of the piece, an echo moving through time and memory.

Research into Aït Haddidou and Amazigh musical culture revealed a relationship to voice that is inseparable from daily life. Singing is not performance. It belongs to work, ritual, gathering, and transmission. In Amazigh group singing, voices move in unison. A song exists because a community carries it, through repetition and collective presence, as an acknowledgement of life itself.

The piece opens with my voice recorded as a soft lullaby, an intimate humming inspired by the singing women carry inside the home. I chose a wordless melody to allow the voice to transcend language, time, and place, reflecting how memory often survives beyond words - the peculiar way a melody, or even a scent, can instantly transport us through time.

As the piece unfolds, the voice thickens and multiplies, gradually transforming into a collective chant. Intimacy expands into togetherness. Repetition becomes more insistent. The singing grows intense, almost like a march — not as a gesture of power, but as an act of persistence and the strength that lies within a community. As a nomadic people, I like to imagine these songs carrying a sense of home and belonging.

The market recording functions as a living archive. Through spatialisation, spectral processing, and subtle glitch-like distortions, voices and noises stretch, fragment, and drift. The market shifts between reality and dream, familiar and haunted.

My practice combines voice, field recording, and spatial sonic exploration. Coming from a multicultural background, partly Arabic, this piece resonates deeply with my ongoing exploration of memory, identity, exile, and the way we carry the voices of our ancestors across time.

The title YAZ refers to the Amazigh symbol ⵣ, a sign of freedom, dignity, and resistance. The piece is conceived as a call across ages. A reminder that voices do not vanish. When we listen, they return.

Market sounds, Morocco reimagined by Ilhem.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds