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

  • 2634: Compulsion
    New York sirens reimagined by Keira Simmons.
    In creating this piece I was interested in evoking the feelings I experienced while living in New York in 2017, feelings of dissociation, submersion in life and the mess of the world. 
    I arrived on Inauguration Day, and quickly became familiar with the sound of emergency sirens. 
    Without using too much complex processing throughout the piece, I used my library of field recordings from my time living and protesting there to build up a sense of the city. 
    The relentless hum, the dishevelment, the loss, the moments of clarity, the endless cycle of the sirens. 
    My reading of Adam Zagajewski's "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" (from Central Park in Aug 2017) captures the sense of innocence that I and the people around me tightly held onto at that time. 
    In this piece I mostly looped, filtered and used reverb, with only a couple of tracks using granular synthesis to create tonal textures.
    11 min
  • 2633: The sirens of Manhattan
    A classic NYC sound - a fire truck trying to get through traffic, accompanied later by a police car. The sounds of sirens are reflected across the whole of Manhattan by the vast concrete and glass surfaces of the skyscrapers, so their already-impressive sounds resonate even further and louder than they would in other cities. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    2 min
  • 2632: Rangers vs. Islanders, Madison Square Garden
    The sounds of ice hockey from the iconic Madison Square Garden. Thanks to their thorough security checks and policies on recording equipment, it wasn't possible to get our full recording kit in, so this is a mobile phone recording, but it captures the essence of what you hear from up in the stands - including a goal, excitable announcements and the classic ice hockey organ. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    10 min
  • 2631: On an Island
    Rangers vs. Islanders reimagined by Karhide.
    I randomly chopped up the sample and created loops using the Egoist plugin from SugarBytes and then built the track from that foundation along with a pad sound created from a long section of the field recording, adding a choir type effect.
    4 min
  • 2630: Whipping up a storm in the mountains
    Birds in the Dolomites reimagined by Cities and Memory. 
    When recording 2,400m up in the mountains, the sound of wind and bad weather can be your worst enemy, throwing off any plans to record sound with roaring, ripping disruption. Contemplating this peaceful scene from an August day, we've introduced an impending, fictional storm, as winds are generated, thunder cracks across the sky and the heavens open - a building synth pulse underneath holds the tension and asks "are we imagining this, or is it real?". The bird song, with a touch of delay, sometimes forwards, sometimes backwards, adds to the uncanny nature of the new soundscape.
    6 min
  • 2629: Birds nesting in the Dolomites
    2,400 metres up in the Italian Dolomites, we tune into the sounds of birds nesting and wheeling overhead as we climb the mountain paths. The sound of the birds reverberates for many hundreds of metres across this peaceful scene, and we can hear the sound of a few fellow walkers 200m below us punctuating the serenity. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    2 min
  • 2628: Eleven million tonnes of steam
    New York steam pipes reimagined by Cities and Memory. 
    The New York steam system is iconic - known from the big screen as much as from walking around Manhattan, but fewer people know how it works, or indeed what purpose it serves. To many it looks like mysterious gases escaping from the subterranean world of the sewers. The starting point for this piece is the mystery of the steam pipes, and trying to create a piece built around those sounds that feels subterranean, as if the music itself is escaping from a crack in the ground, and drifting around the night skies of Manhattan. 
    Best listened to on headphones, while walking around midtown Manhattan at 3am.
    7 min
  • 2627: The hissing steam pipes of New York City
    They're everywhere! These hissing pipes are part of a steam power system running throughout Manhattan used for everything from heating to cooling, but more than that they're a mysterious and fascinating icon of New York that we all know from a hundred movies. Weirdly alluring considering it's just a stripey pipe with steam coming out of it, but here's what it sounds like! Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    3 min
  • 2626: The Boroughs
    Brooklyn Bridge reimagined by Nick St. George.
    "One of the advantages of having an American wife who's done a bit of acting is when Cities & Memory offers up a project from the USA, one has a most valuable resource close at hand! I asked my spouse to sing and speak the names of the New York boroughs, and mixed them in with a number of manipulated and clean versions of the field recording. Add in a sprinkling of more melodic elements and the result, I hope, is an anthem to both the cacophony and euphony of any major city. As they say in NYC: "Enjoy!""
    9 min
  • 2625: On Brooklyn Bridge
    In the middle of the famous Brooklyn Bridge, we can hear the sound of hundreds of tourists both on foot and on bicycles, with the background roar of thousands of vehicles passing through. In the foreground, enterprising salesmen offer bottles of ice cold water to passers-by. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    4 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.