Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Michael McDermott's recording from the picturesque Irish peninsula.

A distinctly unsettling and unexplained noise coming from a barn near Frome, UK. Recorded by Nick St. George.

Nick St. George reimagines his own sound:

"One Summer Saturday our village on the Wiltshire/Somerset border was haunted by an extremely loud and eerie sound. Was it an animal in pain? It would have to be a mighty big cow to make that sort of noise… Farm machinery? Again something huge and prevously unseen or heard in these parts must have been imported overnight, if that was the case. Aircraft? (we get civilian and military here every now and then). The sound was too consistent for that… Unable to answer these burning questions from a safe distance, your intrepid sound artist (with wife for protection) sallied forth to discover more. On the edge of the village a new complex of barns is being built. The noise was emanating from one of the almost-finished structures. The source appeared to be a bright yellow machine that was working there, twisting and turning within the barn. Laying a floor covering of some sort? I couldn't get close enough to determine exactly what it was doing, but I pressed “record” nonetheless…

I sympathised with my neighbours as it had been annoying the village all day. But it was manna from heaven for a sound recordist. I got there just in time too. At 5pm it stopped and hasn’t been heard again since.

The "re-imagining” starts with the raw sound and then comprises purely of that layered in various guises. Nothing external (loops, samples etc) has been added. The piece starts off like a West Country tribute to Jimi Hendrix playing the Star Spangled Banner and ends up like Tangerine Dream with a hangover (too much cider?). It is a classic example of taking a chunk of raw material, going with the flow and seeing what comes out of it. Who was it that said the sculpture is always inside the block of stone just waiting to be released?"

Reimagined version of the wind and alarm sounds from Swansea's abandoned beach observatory, August 2015.

The wind whistles through a small gap in a wall at Swansea's abandoned beach observatory, while a security alarm beeps rhythmically above.

Inspired by Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, I recorded everything I heard inside the Dreamland amusement park in Margate for one hour in June 2015. This field recording accompanies the text piece, and represents an uninterrupted, unedited hour of life inside Dreamland.

www.citiesandmemory.com/dreamland

A reimagination of a hare krishna parade in Cardiff city centre, July 2015.

Working Street, Cardiff - a hare krishna procession marches through the city.

Daniel Williams reimagines our sound from May Morning in Oxford.

"This one started with me breaking the recording down into three "events". Bagpipes, bells/chatter and applause. Starting with the bells/chatter, I made three copies and pitched one down an octave or so and applied a hi-pass filter to the second and a low-pass to the third; These were then later layered in Cubase.

One bagpipe recording is slowed right down and is present throughout most of the track. Whilst a pitched down bagpipe is present at the end, sounding quite woodwindish.

The glassy fractured intro is a granulation of the original recording rendered at different pitches using variations in the buffer size and then layered in the DAW.

The strings are from a sample library and mostly follow a three note motif with two sine waves layered underneath from a soft synth.

As I began to assemble the piece I was struck by how the individual is subsumed into the "walla" of the crowd. And how for every seemingly happy voice there is a world of drama and sadness, a life, rolling away in the background.

So in the end the piece became an attempt to capture the melancholy of a crowd in the act of celebration.

The "Madonna and child" woman (if that is what she's saying) has a very strange mix of emotion in her voice; I feel like she really makes this piece."

May Morning 2015, Oxford - bagpipe players, celebrating dancers and the early morning bells from St. Mary's church, outside the Radcliffe Camera.