Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

By Cities and MemorySociety & CultureArtsMusicPlaces & Travel
Download on the App Store

Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • We'll Meet Again
    Ellen Southern reimagines our recording from Cardiff Castle, February 2016.
    This work began when Cities and Memory made an open call to create sonic reimagining’s from a selection of their field recordings. I chose a recording made at Cardiff Castle as the basis for a sound work, as it has an interesting vocal element (echoes of a recording of Vera Lynn singing the evocative war-time song ‘We’ll Meet Again”), and as Cardiff Castle is somewhere I remember from a visit as a child growing up in Wales. This combination of voice, nostalgia, intrigue and acoustic atmosphere drew me to the recording.
    In considering where to site my response, I quickly thought of what to me is an acoustically similar space in Bristol, where I live: the Trenchard Street multi-storey car park. It is an imposing, resonant, stark, grey, brutalist building in the city centre, which is quite surreal to wander around at night, even feeling slightly edgy to be alone in. This building seemed apt also because such buildings were often built on bomb-sites, and this particular one stands where, on the 2nd of November 1940, bombs destroyed The Prince Theatre, leaving no visible trace that it ever existed on this site. This ghostly link between a lost place of popular performance and an emotive song so connected to the second world war, seemed a potent combination.
    So, I went to the car park on a cold night with my field recorder and the song lyrics, and used the physical distances of the place itself to create spatial vocal effects using the acoustics of the site. I didn’t sing the consonants in the lyrics, so as to increase the ‘muffled’ and distant feel of the voice, like an old recording, or a half heard and half remembered song. I used the bleak, windswept car park platforms, and the stained, resonant stairwells to experiment with the sounds of my movement and my voice. I also captured the voices of passing party-goers, and a persistent low flying helicopter, which added quite fitting droning plane sound to the resulting work. I edited together the resulting recordings, maintaining the natural variations in distance and volume, and crafted them to transform from a lone solo voice into a dislocated chorus and crescendo.
    3 min
  • Rialto market at closing time
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    By Jose Sonosfera.
    "I used three base recordings from which I chose the words in italian, spanish and portuguese languages; the pieces were cut and the sounds from words of these three languages assembled with each other, with no particular order, I made a "collage" of those sounds;
    the next step was cut all the silence and apply sound effects."
    5 min

About Cities and Memory - remixing the world

From the publisher's feed

Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world.