Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

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Cities and Memory - remixing the world episodes

  • We Keep Pigeons
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Hearn Gadbois.
    I used a mess of Dada techniques to produce this work. In working on it, the first thing that struck me was the extent to which techniques that were once exclusively the domain of DADA have become the canon, or Standard Operating Procedure for artists, producers, designers, musicians, writers, filmmakers, (the list goes endlessly on). It would be a real challenge to find anything from an advertisement to a piece of pop music that doesn't employ some Dada technique, whether knowingly or not. One wonders what the pioneers of the movement would make of the ubiquity of their once-outlandish ways of working.
    What I did was take a field recording of gulls and geese being fed along a strand and chop it up, rearrange, and process the sounds into what sounds a bit like a demented brass band.
    Dada-wise, it contains Montage (in this case audiomontage) as its components have been reassembled out of sequence. The same applies for collage, sound poetry, assemblage.
    That bits of the field recording have been cut up, repositioned, re-proportioned, and re-juxtaposed as well as multiplied, and that the geese were slowed to half-speed to create a different tuning and sonic function not identifiably present in the original- these meet such criteria, at least technically. The original audio has a stereo field that is a bit asymmetrical which I preserved mostly by being uncompelled to correct or balance it- however, I did add some very abstracted spatiality by applying reverbs to fragments and passages. There is an entirely divorced-from-reality dimensionality as a result.
    I refrained from adding anything in the way of instruments except for a few effects: reverbs, eqs and amplitude modulation to shift tonalities, tweak noise levels and draw the ear along. I felt that the basic audio should be native to itself.
    3 min
  • Feeding gulls and geese
    Feeding the local birds on the banks of the River Cherwell, Oxford. Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    Recorded by Cities and Memory.
    5 min
  • How to Make a Dadaist Field Recording
    Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Fritz Schlueter.
    How to Make a Dadaist Field Recording
    (according to Tristan Tzara's method How to Make a Dadaist Poem)
    To make a Dadaist Field Recording:
    1. Take a field recording.
    2. Take a digital audio workstation.
    3. Choose a section of the field recording as long as you are planning to make your Dadaist field recording.
    4. Cut out the section.
    5. Then split this section randomly in short pieces and arrange the snippets on four different tracks.
    6. Shuffle all the pieces several times, randomly reverse some of the pieces.
    7. Then take the scraps one after the other and put it on one track in the order in which they are, without gaps.
    8. Render conscientiously to a new file.
    9. The recording will be like you.
    10. And here are you a sound artist, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.
    --Fritz Schlüter (according to Tristan Tzara's method How to Make a Dadaist Poem, see http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/tzara.html, accessed on January 10th, 2016)
    4 min
  • Dreamland Welcomes You - an amusement park reimagined
    A reimagination of the sounds of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, constructed around samples from the park gathered at its relaunch in 2015.
    The piece is built around the following aspects of Dreamland:
    00.00 - Super 8 films and old news clips
    02.25 - The hydraulic-powered Hurricane Jets and Jumping Ships rides
    07.20 - Inside the vintage video game arcades
    08.07 - The Wall of Death Show
    11.18 - On board the Chairoplanes: screaming and fun
    13.55 - Margate by night
    17.15 - Ladies and gentlemen, one and all… Dreamland's street performers
    Part of our Dreamland project - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dreamland
    20 min
  • Welt voll Irrsinn in Sweden
    By AJ Born. Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds
    "I chose the Stockholm Fountain for the Dada project. It turned out, that this is a very monotone sound. But one idea of Dada is to create senseless art, so here is what I did:
    To give this boring fountain some absurdity, I let it acoustically wander over the place. In addition, I let it flow slower or more quickly. It gets sometimes louder, sometimes quieter. At the end, it loses a mad race against itself.
    But these things can hardly be heard, due to the loud chorus I added: My 14 different split-personalities read the poem "Welt voll Irrsinn" (world of madness) by Kurt Schwitters and my old grandfather clock in the background beats the time in a crazy way.
    Why combine the fountain, the poem and the clock? Well, somehow there is a connection, because there is a lot about a fish in the poem and it is as well about lifetime and death, for which the clock is a well known symbol as well as a flowing river."
    4 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.