Cities and Memory - remixing the world

 "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...

"The original field recording of the botanic gardens in Tallinn, Estonia, reminded me of how much I enjoy visiting these spaces, unusual and exotic flora from around the world in a little capsule… some rare specimens may only exist in these manmade protective bubbles… "For the project I extracted 6 sections of the original audio, between 5 and 25 seconds in length… (No other audio was used). I pro...

"In the recording that forms the basis of the composition, two elements act as tonic and signal, respectively: the sound of the grackles and a loud siren. The siren, a disturbing element, has been time-stretched to transform it into brushstrokes of colour, thus entering a new temporal and gestural dimension. These brushstrokes of colour unfold against the background sound of the grackles."  | Nico...

Bees swarming around their insect hotel in a small city park and birds chirping in the background. Recorded in Goettingen, Germany by Gilberto Mazzoli.

Under the Wilhelm-Kaisen Bruecke, with trams overhead on the bridge, bicycles and walkers passing us, and the natural reverb sounds of such a large concrete structure heard from beneath.  Recorded in Bremen, Germany by Cities and Memory. 

Historically, Wuhan’s soundscape must have been incredibly diverse — a nexus of nine provinces and a land of rivers and lakes. Yet, precisely because of this, its development and changes have been lightning fast. Changti Street was one of the few spots that fit the project’s theme at the time. In the afternoon, the street buzzes with activity but feels relaxed and unhurried.  Shop owners along the...

Water at the Ground Zero Memorial. Two basins approximately on the site of each of the twin towers. The sound in the Ambisonics recording is of the water flowing into the two pools. Recorded by Anders Vinjar.

"I got married in Wuhan in 2010, and always found the place to be even more chaotic than the rest of China. The best thing, though, is breakfast, which we always had from a stall in the street and sat and ate while the rush hour got going nearby. I've used this sample to recreate something of the aural landscape of those mornings, as well as the salty and spicy flavour of the food." Wuhan old town...

"I used the recording of Ground Zero in New York, I shortened it and manipulated the sound in Adobe Audition. I like creating noise." Ground Zero reimagined by Matej Velkavrh.

"Hyena Signal (Industrial Drift) is an evolving piece born from a collaboration between Karhide and Deep Dive Sound, shaped around snippets of the recording “Maasai Tribe: Songs of the Widows.” The work emerged through a natural creative process, blending Karhide’s post rock and drone influenced textures with Deep Dive Sound’s nature immersed ambient layers and distinctive field recordings. "Karhi...

Outside Oslo's impressive, somewhat brutalist town hall building, there is a large "staircase fountain" with many layers - here we record the sounds from this fountain from many different depths and angles, with the faint sounds of the city at 10.00pm on a quiret evening behind us. Recorded in Oslo, Norway by Cities and Memory, May 2025.