Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"The field recording spoke to me of slow, gentle and happy co-existence, across cultures, across generations and between people and nature. Musically the track is built around a short rhythmic motif extracted from the original source; this set the pace, the root tone and the overall feel of the piece." Rabat soundwalk reimagined by Thom Cuschieri.

"I asked for a random field recording and was very happy to get this assigned. I visited the market ~40 years ago, and this field recording brings back the sensory overload of the place. While there I bought a pair of iron castanets which are hanging on my wall. You can hear the traders playing these on the field recording, they deliver a harsh ‘clacking’ noise on the ears and also a harsh pinch o...

"I took small snippets of the Imlil waterfall in Atlas Mountains recording to make digital noise and then composed a digital waterfall around them as they fire off at random. Waterfalls are natural wonders and they are beautiful to witness. They make an incredible noise which out of context (without the wonderful visual) can feel rather unnatural and undesirable. We are heading to - if not already...

At Hannover 96 vs. Greuther Fuerth, 11 May 2025 (final score: 1-1). The pre-match anthem is a German song which prompts a mass singalong from the entire stadium, as a traditional pre-match ritual.  Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

In the central concourse of Hannover Hauptbahnhof, with crowd noises, announcements, and notably someone playing classical piano towards the entrance.  Recorded in May 2025 by Cities and Memory. 

Waves lap on a driftwood and sand beach only accessible by boat in the Po Delta, Italy, June 2025. Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

This recording was taken while standing outside a tiny church in Meghalaya, one of three states in India to have a Christian majority. The congregation was singing hymns in Khasi a few days before Easter. The room was sparse and the singing carried into the quiet town, lit by a few new street lights built by the mining corporations steadily taking over the lush surrounding hills.  Recorded in Bris...

"Improvised violin input triggers and guides various drone instruments that are all generated from either the violin input, or from the Cities and Memory "Italy Po Delta" field recording. Submitted audio is a frozen excerpt of an ever-evolving soundscape that responds to the violin input."  Po Delta waves in Italy reimagined by Jeremy Sklad (rtfct).

"This piece takes the original recording and focuses on the relationship between destructive extraction and a tiny town in the hills, surrounded by lush mountains, deep caves, and amazing waterfalls. The hills are alive but no longer untouched. Star Cement is slowly trudging through the Jaintia hills. The enormous foreboding lights can be seen from the single-road village while the singing drifts...

"We selected the field recording because the chanting of large crowds seems to be everywhere this year. There are so many gatherings of folk, taking to the streets to make their point. The German stadium singalong was a good starting point for our own field recording collection.  "Combining the Union Chapel choir and minister’s gentle anthems, with the drumming of a wiccan at Crossbones’ Memorial...

 "Train stations have always been very cinematic. The original field recording that grabbed my attention is of a busy public space with travelers walking through it, that slowly is colored by the resonance of someone playing the piano from afar. So the idea was to keep the two main pillars of movement and traces.  "With no premeditated structure, and in a very intuitive way, the composition starts...

An impressive busker outside the Hannover 96 stadium, playing the didgeridoo and hand drums at a high pace, while high-fiving anyone who leaves him some cash (including your Cities and Memory recordist). Wearing a Hannover 96 shirt, his music is much appreciated by the thousands of fans walking past him to go to the match. Recorded in May 2025 by Cities and Memory. 

A metro journey on line 10 to Jussieu, with the sounds of closing and opening doors, announcement, passengers chatting and the rumble rails.  Recorded in Paris, France in February 2026 by Cities and Memory.

|A tradition apparently dating back 400 years, the Palm Sunday procession at Christchurch College, Oxford University. A donkey (called Monty!) leads a procession of worshippers holding palm leaves and crosses from the gardens of the college, along a main street, around the college quadrangle and into the chapel for a service.  Around 100 worshippers take part, singing a hymn as they proceed, accom...

As the first faint fingers of light begin to break the night, the first song calls out into the magic of the dawn.  In the cool clear air when the day still belongs to them alone, the songbirds with their ancient wisdom use the magical hours when their beautiful songs can travel clearly & furthest across the skies.  They sing to celebrate their survival, greeting each day with joy. They send a...

On cold days at noon, in the woods of Vukomeričke Gorice near Sisak in Croatia, silence usually prevails because the morning birdsong has already died down and the evening song has not yet begun. But with the rise in temperature, the snow begins to melt, creating streams in otherwise dry beds. The murmur of water can be heard from far away. This is a close-up recording of three such little streams...

"The source made me think of German metro-tunnels, so I wanted to include footsteps, which THEN put me in mind of the poem The Panther by Rainer Maria Rilke. The poem is (amongst other things) about the impotent power of the caged big cat, forlorn, empty-hearted, broken, pacing but going nowhere. I'm reading the poem in my faltering German!  "For the second half of the piece, I wanted to highlight...

"‘At The Same’ uses a field recording of a journey on the Paris Metro. I wanted to imagine many different journeys happening at the same time. The entire file was placed in a software that can randomly scan an entire file and play back snippets from different parts, I did this using Reaktor software. This randomly scanned audio snippets were recorded for 6 minutes in Logic. "On listening back, I n...

"The field recording was of a Palm Sunday procession and sermon. I used this inspiration to imagine Jesus entering Jerusalem to praise an adoration. The haunting melody and jarring counter melody represents his knowledge and inevitability of what was to come. I used Ableton Live." Palm Sunday at Christchurch College, Oxford reimagined by Lynn Findlay.

"I love the dawn and dusk chorus. The birds sound so joyous to me. The music is an attempt to meet and match that joyousness - drawing inspiration from what I have heard in some of the guitar playing of South Africa. While recording, a song thrush turned up in my garden to add its own birdsong solo to the piece!" Lyme Regis dawn chorus, England reimagined by Gareth Williams.

"I love this field recording - its evocation of place and water and also the complexity of the sounds the water makes. If I had the skills I would extract some of the tones and make a three-voiced fugue out of them; as it is I've tried to respond to the different streams with the human sounds they suggest, celebrating the affinities between people and wild water in a version of sonata form.  Strea...

"The recording immediately jumped out at me with its' chattering insects, bees and voices, and a little noise.  "I wanted to draw tones from the buzzing and clicks to make something that felt like you were exploring the world through resonance and reflection. "I did a little live modular jamming to explore the material first - which led to this idea of using the bees buzzing as a gateway into this...

"Originating from the ghosts of urban interactions, the field recording was completely taken apart. Fragments were stretched and reshaped into drones, others reduced to abstract one-shots that sit somewhere between percussion and texture. "Everything was composed and arranged in Ableton Live 12 with Push 3, and built entirely on instinct. No plan, no concept, just chasing what sounded right until...

Recording inside three different zones of the Palm House at Tallinn Botanic Garden, with the natural reverby acoustic of the space, piped birdsong, and the sounds of various fans and heating devices.  Recorded in Tallinn, Estonia by Cities and Memory. 

Great-tailed grackles force their existence into urban spaces. Every dusk during Arizona's mild winters, these birds congregate and chatter for two hours, avian voices intermingling with bustling downtown activity. This sample features the grackles at their peak, a hundred birds shouting to be heard over one another. Yet, they share an uneasy coexistence with the city: local businesses hire people...