Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"I found the recorded voices both compelling and slightly disturbing. The levity around the use of a spice to drug 'brides to be' was deeply uncomfortable. Having lived in Tanzania and having some familiarity with the culture, I wanted to create a piece that was both challenging and a celebration. I felt conflicted, wanting to capture both the incredible joy of the people and community, and the profound sadness of the history of the area. I wanted to capture something of the trance like nature of the local rhythms and contrast that with more European melodies."

Nutmeg use in Zanzibar reimagined by deadkousin.

A tour guide in the spice farm is describing to the group how nutmeg is used by locals to as a drug by men to replace alcohol, or is given to young bridges who are afraid of their wedding night. 

Zanzibar is known as the “spice island” and exports a number of spices including nutmeg. It also does a roaring tourist trade showing tourists around the farms and selling spices in Stone Town market. 

Recorded in Dole, Zanzibar by Marg Laing.

I walked into my local market one day, out of sorts, and I came across a freezer in the back of the store that sounded like it was malfunctioning. I could very much relate.

I had my recorder with me that day so I thought it would be a cool sound to use in my music making.

I recorded the loud, mechanical sound while my partner patiently waited for me. I kept recording as I turned to walk out and I also captured the music that they were playing in the market. It was an old pop song by INXS called "What You Need" which I found to be amusing. After spending some time recording a grinding, mechanical sound in a dark register, it made me laugh to turn and face the catchy, upbeat song. And that is why I named my recording "Not What You Need".

The rest of the recording is a snippet of a conversation, the noise of the check out and me opening the door to the street as a car rumbles by.

By the way, I never did get around to sampling the sound. Maybe someday.

Recorded in Baltimore by Bill McKenna.

"I wanted to see if I could make some music without any musical instruments: No keyboards. No guitars. No wind instruments. No drums or bass. I think I succeeded but then I'm not the final judge. I sampled from the original recording a car rolling past the market which becomes the bass line. The failing refrigerator becomes a beat. I looped other elements in the grocery store including a short conversation, an employee laugh and a brief snippet of a pop song playing in the store. I also added some recordings from my kitchen which I then cut up: tea kettle whistle, knife cutting veggies, turning off the kitchen fan, etc.

"What does "Hey You Yes Please" sound like? I don't really know. It's nothing serious but it brings a smile to my face every time I listen which I think is the whole point."

Baltimore soundscape reimagined by Bill McKenna.

A rare chance to hear the sounds from a community oven, which are in every neighbourhood in the city. People bring their bread dough, their tagine or whatever else needs cooking, pay a small amount of money and use the huge community oven to cook it. It's efficient, cheap, and it brings the community together - wonderful. 

Recorded in Marrakesh, Morocco, January 2026 by Cities and Memory. 

Roadside stop on Route 66 in Arizona, USA. Richard J. Lovington memorial garden; sound of chimes, birds and occasional passing traffic.

Recorded by Mark Wilden.

"T'he road was there' uses a field recording made by Mark Wilden. The recording is of the Hackberry General Store, a famous road stop on Route 66 in Arizona, USA. I was enamored with the chimes from the field recording, which I filtered and fed through a series of delays and reverbs. The filtered chimes are accompanied by sine waves and my electric guitar."

Hackberry general store, Arizona reimagined by Chris Cresswell.

"I am an advocate of food sovereignty, and I believe that coming together around food preparation and consumption, in its most simplest forms, strengthens communities and relationships. 

"Combining this perspective, with the visual images the source sound provoked in my imagination, I chose to work with a field recording of a communal bread baking oven in Marrakesh, Morocco. 

"In the recording I was taken by the natural rhythmic quality of dough kneading, and this gave me an immediate way in - taking a few imperfect samples from these, as an earthy basis for my composition.

"I invited several friends to speak simple related phrases in different languages, (Czech, Thai, Spanish, Norwegian, French and German) - to emphasise a sense of connectivity and expansiveness in the piece and bring a feeling of incantation."

Marrakesh community oven reimagined by Suzi Lamb.

"The source material for my submission to this most recent Cities & Memory call is a field recording by Shaye Thiel, a New York artist whose medium is sound, hearing, perception, and the practice of attention. She is hard-of-hearing and these sounds were recorded with her hearing aids. 

"I chose to work with and reinterpret Thiel’s field recording because I really loved the description of her art and work provided in her cv [https://shayethiel.com]. I encourage you to read it! I first started making ambient/minimal music as a way to address personal issues with tinnitus, insomnia, and anxiety. I really took Brian Eno’s “as interesting as it is ignorable” quote to heart, because that sort of liminal music had personally provided me a lot of relief. 

"I’m interested in creating music that isn’t necessarily musical; that uses barely perceptible elements to draw attention or distract it; in which heard sounds or rhythms might actually exist or might simply be created by the convergence of other sounds, the cancellation of frequencies, or who knows what. As Thiel puts it in her cv, sounds that are “entangled, co-created and in constant negotiation.” 

"My piece was entirely created and assembled in Koala Sampler on my iPhone. 

"All melodic elements, however simple or complex, have as their root the same single wave cycle, sliced from somewhere in the nineteen-minute recording. 

"Some of the rhythmic elements are samples from the recording, and some are random noises from Fractal Bits."

New York hearing aid soundscape reimagined by daddy fall down.

"As I began losing my hearing, the urgency of archiving memory through everyday sounds became more pressing. This raw audio was captured through my hearing aids while I walked across the Manhattan Bridge from Brooklyn, suspending the listener while people shift around them in the subway, in cars, cycling and on foot. This is an ongoing research project capturing the difference in my hearing loss combined with noise pollution by recording in the same location on the same day, year over year."

Recorded by Shaye Thiel.