Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Part of our Prison Songs project - see www.citiesandmemory.com/prisonsongs for full details.

Reimagined version of 'Black Women' by Anthony Lyons.

"Weigh-Five Hundred reimagines the original recording of Black Women. It is partly ambient but also glitch and beat heavy in parts. I was drawn to three main qualities in the original recording - the soulful, bluesy sound of the grouped vocal, the persistent percussive stomping, and the imperfections or artefacts in the recording itself. I used both small fragments and longer sections from the recording. Some of these resampled parts were heavily manipulated through processes such as grain delays, pitch shifting, and reversing, while other parts were left as more clearly identifiable recurring short loops. Some of the smaller processed fragments became material for the glitched beats and pulses that build up and break down in layers. I included a few randomisation processes and the final recording comes largely from playing the prepared sounds and instrument devices ‘live’ then making just a few edits in the DAW."

Part of our Prison Songs project - see www.citiesandmemory.com/prisonsongs for full details.

By Sofia Botero.

"My inspiration for this piece comes from my very own experience as a mother and housekeeper, and from the repetition that taking care of someone implies, as far as cooking, cleaning, caring, and cooking, cleaning, caring again and again, repeatedly, a never ending task, a rewarding, nonetheless heartbreaking commitment. As much as I find this song distressing, I also find it soothing. For reasons I can't quite pinpoint, I found an echo, a graceful reverberation, of my own confinement."

Part of our Prison Songs project - see www.citiesandmemory.com/prisonsongs for full details.

Recorded at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in 1947 by Dr. Harry Oster. Courtesy Archive.org.

A reimagined sound of the ferry from Amsterdam Centraal. All sounds are taken directly from manipulating the original field recording with no additional sounds added. By Cities and Memory.

Recording of the short ferry trip from Amsterdam Centraal station to Amsterdam Noord, November 2015.

By Jamie Lickfold (Sevenism). "There's a country park near where we live that used to be a tip... but when the mountain of rubbish got too much they tried to revert it back to nature. it's getting there but it's pretty strange - barren in places, and more pet dogs than actual wildlife. i thought i saw some birds fly by at one point but it was dappled sunlight reflected off cars passing behind trees. at the top there's a huge solar farm which, amongst trees; and with crows guarding the solar panels; looks like a utopian future of clean energy."

"This piece is a field recording of the park; an appropriate mix of un/natural sounds. i isolated some of the interesting sounds - the low melody is from a plane, rhythm from a barking dog and incidental sounds, the strange acid sounds from a bird tweeting high above (at the end my partner is pointing out where the bird is)."

Recorded by Jamie Lickfold (Sevenism). "There's a country park near where we live that used to be a tip... but when the mountain of rubbish got too much they tried to revert it back to nature. it's getting there but it's pretty strange - barren in places, and more pet dogs than actual wildlife. i thought i saw some birds fly by at one point but it was dappled sunlight reflected off cars passing behind trees. at the top there's a huge solar farm which, amongst trees; and with crows guarding the solar panels; looks like a utopian future of clean energy."

"This piece is a field recording of the park; an appropriate mix of un/natural sounds. i isolated some of the interesting sounds - the low melody is from a plane, rhythm from a barking dog and incidental sounds, the strange acid sounds from a bird tweeting high above (at the end my partner is pointing out where the bird is)."

Our reimagined version of waves and wind in the Lake District, built around waves of synths.

Crummock Water, the Lake District, UK, on a wild, wet and windy holiday weekend. Recorded by Cities and Memory.

Jeff Dungfelder reimagines the sound of an organ grinder on the streets of Mexico City, March 2016.