Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Alex Hehir.

"This binaural recording really captured the place for me and I have focussed much of the piece around the gong sounds.The piece starts and ends with the original field recording of the gong strikes and slowly morphs into my reimagined version of them.I played around with many different pitches and I wanted to create a mediative feeling of falling slowly down into a hazy abyss!Even though sounding very repetitive ,many of the sounds evolve over the course of the piece.The main tools used were Izotope's Iris and a Vermona drum machine."

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Recorded by Stephane Marin.

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Oliver Smith.

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Recorded by Larva Peruzzotti.

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Recorded by Simon Proffitt.

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Alexander Baker.

"Templo Mayor - temple of the Aztecs in their capital city of Tenochtitlan, which is now Mexico City. Spanish architecture built on the ruins of a site dedicated simultaneously to two gods, Huitzilopchtli god of war, and Tlaloc, god of rain and agriculture, and Quetzalcoatl in his form as the wind god, Ehecatl. Now a major archeological site, a tourist attraction...

¿Sacred rituals, blood sacrifice, the past misting up through layers of history into the present...?

Yet as I worked, I heard and closely reheard the everyday sounds and voices of children, women, men, sounds now themselves past, and perhaps those fleeting, precious moments affected me most and coloured the piece with melancholy; hence the title. Transformations from original recording, with some synthesised echoes of likely Aztec instruments - percussion, pipes, horns, whistles."

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Recorded by Manuel Guerrero.

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Leslie Rollins.

"Field Recoding (note lack of “r” in “co()ding”) is a process I utilize to resituate field recordings into new surroundings. Most often utilizing my own field recordings with my modular synthesizer. Often, the first step in Recoding is re-recording the source Field Recording inside my studio space. I approach these recording sessions just as I would my standard outside field recording sessions, meaning that the environment and sounds within it are very deliberately chosen and engaged with. In the case of this piece, I played the original .wav file directly from the Dropbox folder on my iPhone 7+ which was sat within a Tibetan Singing Bowl. The singing bowl’s resonance, excited by the iPhone’s speakers, was captured by a contact microphone attached to the outside of the bowl. The low drone heard in the left channel at the start of the piece is the sound of a large tractor clearing debris in the park a block from my home. Its rumbling travelled through the ground, up the walls of my home, and vibrated the desk that the bowl and phone sat on. At approximately the 1:18 moment of the piece, I turn on my own vacuum which was recorded to the right side of the sound field utilizing a coil pick-up attached to the exterior of the vacuum, revealing the inner workings of the electromagnetic field running through it. The contact mic picked up a bit of the ambient sound of my vacuum as well. At approximately 3:33 of the piece, I turn off my vacuum and allow the original recording to play out. Finally, we return to the low drone provided by the tractor. The title of the piece is a play on Jeff Koon’s “New Hoover Convertibles (1981)” (see attached image). I’m always awed by the sheer dimensions of places like Southwell Minster. The sense of literal space is overwhelming on a cosmic level. I like the no-nonsense idea of somebody vacuuming such a space. Moving the air (dare I say “Spirit”) in a very honest way. My piece attempts to bridge the space between my sacred space and another. I situated the Recoding within the bowl, a sacred object which is precious to me. In Koons work, he’s elevated something which could be seen as “lowly” to a new, higher station. A redemption of sorts."

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Recorded by Cities and Memory. Vacuum cleaning inside Southwell Minster cathedral.

Part of the Sacred Spaces project - find out more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/sacredspaces

Reimagined by Alan Bleay.