Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • 2613: Reel Around The Fountain
    Bethesda Fountain reimagined by Daryn Brown. "I've been to this fountain myself but on a much quieter day than the original recording would suggest. I wanted to keep as much pf the sound of the street performers as possible, but also include how I felt when I was there, cold, bemused and slightly in awe of my surroundings."
    7 min
  • 2612: Three kinds of entertainment, Central Park
    Around the Bethesda Fountain in Central Park, we take a walk and hear three different types of street entertainer within ten minutes, from a bombastic duo playing violins and singing operatically through to a percussive street party of polyrhythmic drumming and lively dancing! Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    13 min
  • 2611: Coltrane in New York
    High Line saxophonist reimagined by Simon Woods. "The inspiration was the ‘Coltrane’ playing saxophonist. I added a piano in the approximate style of another New York musician, Philip Glass.
    I attempted to use only ‘New York’ instruments for the backing, i.e. Moog synth for bass and Steinway modelled piano.
    All the way through the piece is the sounds from when the saxophonist stops playing."
    4 min
  • 2608: The clarity of prayer
    Call to prayer in Saudi Arabia reimagined by Cities and Memory. The striking thing about the original recording is the purity and clarity of the call to prayer - there's hardly any background noise or anything else to interfere with the beauty of this sound. For the reimagined piece, the way to highlight this clarity is for the piece only to achieve it or reach it at the climax. The piece begins with the original recording heavily processed and recomposed using various effects and filters, and then using automations through the rest of the piece, the effects gradually pull back, only revealing the true beauty of the call to prayer by the very end.
    3 min
  • 2609: Maghrib call to prayer on the shores of the Red Sea
    A Maghrib call to prayer recorded in perfect silence at the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia, by the shores of the Red Sea. A particularly striking recording for its clarity and purity - there were no other sounds or background noise to interrupt the beauty of this call to prayer. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    4 min
  • 2602: Light jazz in Times Square
    Times Square is gaudy, garish and packed with thousands of tourists at all times - practically the only New Yorkers are nearby workers and street entertainers. But there's nearly always something going on - when we passed, there was some light jazz being performed at a bandstand in the centre of this temple to commercialism. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    6 min
  • 2605: In these hidden streets
    Small's jazz club reimagined by Jeff Dungfelder.
    When one lives in New York City and has spend some time here walking the streets, the one word that best describes the feeling you get would be "jazz". Because of this, I chose the field recording "Small's Jazz Club Greenwich Village" as the basis of my composition "In these hidden streets". I used samples of these sounds to create new textures and rhythms to create the feeling I wanted to convey. An influence on this project was the Allen Ginsberg poem titled "My Sad Self". To me, its language is a perfect representation of what I tried to express through sound.
    My Sad Self - by Allen Ginsberg
    Sometimes when my eyes are red
    I go up on top of the RCA Building
              and gaze at my world, Manhattan—
                         my buildings, streets I’ve done feats in,
                               lofts, beds, coldwater flats
    —on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
              its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
                   walking the size of specks of wool—
       Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
              sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
                 & Paterson where I played with ants—
       my later loves on 15th Street,
              my greater loves of Lower East Side,
                 my once fabulous amours in the Bronx   
                                            faraway—
       paths crossing in these hidden streets,
          my history summed up, my absences   
                 and ecstasies in Harlem—
          —sun shining down on all I own
           in one eyeblink to the horizon
                   in my last eternity—
                                         matter is water.
    Sad,
          I take the elevator and go
                 down, pondering,
    and walk on the pavements staring into all man’s
                                               plateglass, faces,
                 questioning after who loves,
          and stop, bemused
                 in front of an automobile shopwindow
          standing lost in calm thought,
                 traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me   
                          waiting for a moment when ...
    Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
                          the romantic war news on the radio   
                                         ... all movement stops
    & I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,   
          tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
                 my fingertips touching reality’s face,
          my own face streaked with tears in the mirror   
                 of some window—at dusk—
                                         where I have no desire—
          for bonbons—or to own the dresses or Japanese   
                          lampshades of intellection—
    Confused by the spectacle around me,
              Man struggling up the street
                         with packages, newspapers,
                                               ties, beautiful suits   
                         toward his desire
              Man, woman, streaming over the pavements   
                         red lights clocking hurried watches &   
                                movements at the curb—
    And all these streets leading
              so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
                                by avenues
              stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
                                thru such halting traffic
                                               screaming cars and engines   
    so painfully to this
              countryside, this graveyard
                         this stillness
                                               on deathbed or mountain   
              once seen
                                never regained or desired
                                               in the mind to come
    where all Manhattan that I’ve seen must disappear.
    (New York, October 1958)
    5 min
  • 2604: The heart of the Greenwich jazz scene
    Inside Small's jazz club in Greenwich Village, a club devoted to giving space to the best young, new and upcoming jazz talent on the New York scene - here we tune into a couple of numbers from Ulysses Owen Jr.'s drum-led five-piece. Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    19 min

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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.