Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds

By William Costa (AKA Bilwa). "Mexico Minutes Mix is a sound collage created using a "palette" of one-minute filed recordings, all of which were recorded in Mexico in Oct-Nov 2015. Using the element of chance, I faded tracks in without a pre-fade listen.These recordings range from natural to unnatural sounds and often contain readymade music and singing."

Reimagined sound of a swing in a restaurant garden, Nantes, France. By Mark Taylor.

Reimagined piece from St. Michaelis, Hamburg by Mark Taylor.

The organ of St. Michaelis in Hamburg plays a piece by Bach. Recording by Cities and Memory.

Reimagined piece from Leidseplein, Amsterdam by Mark Taylor.

Recording by Cities and Memory of a saxophone busker and trams arriving and leaving in Amsterdam's Leidseplein.

Recording by Gavin Prior of a creaking swing at Restaurant L'Aquarelle, Nantes.

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Emma Winston.

" For Ssa-ha-la, I chose to use an existing sound from the Cities and Memory database, since I felt this was more in keeping with the spirit of the Dada readymade than procuring my own field recording would have been (although I ultimately manipulated the recording far more than perhaps Marcel Duchamp would have approved of!). Listening closely to the sound of the waves and seagulls at low tide, I decided to write a sound poem, in the 'Bruitist' (or phonetic) form invented by Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, which would reflect and exaggerate the natural sounds accompanying it, replacing semantic logic with sonic logic. The result is a kind of 'sound song' which intertwines with the cries of the gulls and sibilant waves."

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds Gulls crying and feeding at low tide at 10pm on Margate Sands.

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Erik Gould.

" I chose a recording from Switzerland for no other reason than that's where Dada began. Because I was working on it over the Martin Luther King holiday I worked in units of 1.18. I laid a grid over the source recording breaking it up in 1.18 second segments. I used a random number generator to rearrange the clips until I had a length of 1min, 18 seconds. I decided I wanted to collage in sound that related to the moment in time that I was working on this so I randomly recorded a German language news radio station coming out of Switzerland at the same time I was editing the first piece. I took that recording and applied the same method to chop it up. On both recordings I used a second set of randomly generated numbers to apply a small set of effects (backwards, reverb) to a few clips. As an homage to Man Ray I wanted to suggest an aural layer of dust, so I stretched out the edited version of the first track and then I mixed all three together in a very un-Dada deliberate way. "