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

  • Steel drums at Brixton tube station
    Field recording from the London Underground by Cities and Memory.
    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
    2 min
  • The city is a nest (Moorgate)
    Reimagined by Ben Mawson.
    "Between composing in seized moments of freedom from desk-bound or other modes of displacement, I walk the city’s paths and find ways between its intricate boundaries and lines of order.
    I have lived in many cities and countries, but London is where I recognise a city-mother smell, feel an instinctive home-ness, grounded, despite an existence without meaning, without pervasive promise of utopia.
    The city is a nest, a hostile, grinding, binding, churning, fermenting nest, where I live and wander, regardlessly seeking meanings, stories and the smells of lives I do not know, passing me by in a moment.
    This music tries to find an expression of the dreaming, double-selfed self, the experiencer and the outofbody looker, travelling these harsh and deathly tunnels in lighted, sweating, flesh-compacted cells, deep under the pulsing concrete of London.
    It isn’t easy, but there is beauty within."
    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
    6 min
  • Grin and Bear It (Paddington)
    Paddington reimagined by Seth Guy.
    "In the original television series of Paddington Bear, each episode demonstrates that whatever trouble Paddington gets himself into he is always forgiven, that essentially the message is that the Brits are a tolerant people. Both preceding and in the aftermath of Brexit however, our newspapers, televisions and the internet were awash with material which would suggest that we are in fact anything but tolerant and, so I made this work primarily in response to that and our methods of consuming this material.
    Whilst making my own recordings of Paddington Tube as part of my research for the project, I discovered, owing to its acoustics, that the original field recording that I had selected - a “brass band playing at Paddington” - (heard in the first 30 seconds of Grin And Bear It), can’t have been made in the Tube station, and is in fact I believe made in the railway station instead. Coincidentally, I also discovered that in two separate episodes of Paddington Bear, both the railway and tube stations are visited by Paddington and the Browns. This gave me the idea to link the two stations and build a humorous narrative around that link that would draw attention to serious issues but also entertain and delight listeners."
    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
    10 min
  • Sci-fi King's Cross
    King's Cross reimagined by Eden Grey.
    "My inspiration was imagining Kings Cross station as though it were a science fiction setting. Being such a busy station, I was thinking of it in slow motion. I time stretched and pitched down some parts of the recording, in so slowing down the bag pipe player. I added recordings of my modular synthesizer to further create the sci-fi theme."
    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
    8 min
  • Edgware reimagined
    Reimagined by Chris Williams.
    "After isolating quotidian sounds particular to the time and place of a single person walking through a tube station, the challenge became to find a way to navigate a new path through them. The result is a collage emerging from sounds in their original form, processed sounds, fractured sounds, and some additional guitar and synthesizer sounds that harmonize with the natural tone of the space. The results, I hope, constitute a different kind of movement, retaining something of the character of the original recording, while musically reconfiguring the experience of traveling beneath the city."
    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
    13 min
  • Euston's Ocean
    Euston Underground reimagined by Christina Wong.
    "When I first heard the recording (of "Euston Underground Station"), the first thing that popped into my mind was "ocean". Using that as a starting point, I wanted to create a piece that sounded like waves of commuting, waves of sounds (the doors, the chimes, the announcements, the footsteps, etc.) heard underground. And as much as commuting can be dreary, I wanted the piece to be light, so I added the banjo ukulele to it and imagined the song to be a soundtrack to someone's commute."
    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
    3 min
  • A New Wembley
    Wembley Central reimagined by Eric Boivin.
    "I started building this piece by separating into different fractions, sounds of the Wembley Central field recording track that I did find interesting. Afterward, I proceed to manipulate, looped and mixed those parts with found sounds and my own music to produce this atmospheric track."
    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
    4 min
  • Rubble Raking (Ladbroke Grove)
    Ladbroke Grove reimagined by Fergus Kell.y
    "A recording of the Ladbroke Grove ticket hall was the starting point for this piece. I've edited sections of it, pitch-shifted them down and further processed these edits to create free-form electronic textures and drones. These were then stitched together to make a series movements of varying dynamics, depths and densities that give a sense of incident and momentum. The original recordings can be heard untreated, later in the piece. The only other sounds used were a pitch-shifted brass sample to create a momentary noirish resonance, and a back-masked edit from The Slits' song Ping Pong Affair, for historical echoes, as Ari Up refers to Notting Hill in the lyrics."
    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
    6 min
  • Shortcut Through Clutter (Bank)
    Bank station reimagined by Hubert Heathertoes.
    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
    4 min
  • Embankment Microsound
    Reimagined by Jeevan Rai.
    "
    This is an improvised ambient/microsound take. Everything (including pitched material) was derived from the original recording. My approach was centred on thinking about what was above, beneath, and beyond the recordings — projections of stuff that wasn’t in the recording but implicit: hidden mechanics, nearby locations, geology, proximity to water, the glow of Southbank lights from the opposite side of the river…"
    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
    9 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.