Cities and Memory - remixing the world

New College chapel choir in Oxford, UK, reimagined by Leonardo Rosado, September 2016.

"The title "of nothingness" represents the feeling of abandonment and hope. It is supposed to contrast the source material, full of spirituality and the existentialism that lays the foundation for atheism.

Quoting Wikipedia "Sartre, and even more so, Jaques Lacan, use this conception of nothing as the foundation of their atheist philosophy. Equating nothingness with being leads to creation from nothing and hence God is no longer needed for there to be existence.""

Interview on Canadian national radio CBC with Stuart Fowkes on The Next Station project, 5 September 2016.

Recording of rain on a tin roof, reimagined by Richard Bentley.

"The remix is inspired by both Tim Shaw’s original recording of rain under a tin roof and John M Hull’s book ‘Touching the Rock’ which explores Hull’s experience of deteriorating eyesight and eventual blindness. The original recording immediately brought to mind this passage from the book:

“The rain presents the fullness of an entire situation all at once, not merely remembered, not in anticipation, but actually and now. The rain gives a sense of perspective and of the actual relationships of one part of the world to another... I feel as if the world, which is veiled until I touch it, has suddenly disclosed itself to me... As I listen to the rain, I am the image of the rain, and I am one with it.” p.27

For a sighted person, the spatial connection that exists between objects and the relationship of those objects with oneself is usually a given. For Hull, it was the rain that allowed him to experience, very deeply, the intricate connections in a scene and it was the wind and thunder that framed it:

“Thunder puts a roof over my head, a very high, vaulted ceiling of rumbling sound. I realize that I am in a big place, whereas before there was nothing at all. The sighted person always has a roof overhead, in the form of the blue sky or the clouds, or the stars at night.” p.14

The remix reflects this experience of listening meditatively to the rain and the simple enjoyment of hearing the qualities of objects brought to life by it.

My starting point for the remix was to resonate objects found in the garden such as plant pots, a rusty saw and an old spade with the original audio and record the result using microphones and contacts. Around the same time, a field recording I made of rain and a distant thunderstorm across the hills from the village in South Oxfordshire where I live provided both a bed for the track and a rough structure. The resonated recordings were then overlaid, ‘granularised’ and arranged so as to modulate the listeners’ attention between the constituent parts of a sound, sound events and the wider sound field. To creatively encourage this slow shift of attention, two distinct reverberations are employed, created by impulse responses from our garden and a local church. At the end of the remix the resonated objects fade, as thoughts fall away in Hull’s meditation, and the listener is left alone to be with ‘the image of the rain’ and thunder."

Recorded by Tim Shaw.

Uto weather station reimagined by Cities and Memory, August 2016, featuring clips of the Finnish weather forecast broadcast, the Finnish cousin of our Shipping Forecast. Title taken from "To The Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf.

Recorded by Cities and Memory, July 2016. Weather tower radar mechanism on Uto, in the Baltic Sea.

The sound of birds at Jökulsárlón in Iceland reimagined by nobodisoundz (Philippe Neau), August 2016.

Recorded by Mark Wilden - birdsong at Jökulsárlón, Iceland, July 2016.

BBC World Service show World Update interviews Stuart Fowkes from Cities and Memory about London Underground sound map project The Next Station, and the importance of sound. Broadcast on 23 August 2016.

Covent Garden reimagined by Cities and Memory, with guest vocal contributions from twelve languages: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Dutch, Vietnamese and Klingon (!).

Part of our project The Next Station, reimagining the sounds of the London Underground and creating the first ever tube sound map. August 2016 - for more information see www.citiesandmemory.com/thenextstation