Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"The street ambience was fairly intense and in Ableton Live I chopped and processed the traffic noises and played about with the pitch and timbres. A kick drum was used to give a primal rhythm to the piece and Absynth 6 was added, acting as a sonic glue. My idea was to create a soup of a soundscape." Traffic in Guayaquil reimagined by FFRWD. 

Traffic in the centre of Guayaquil (Chile y Aguirre), Ecuador. Rush hour traffic. Hot day.  Recorded by Jean-Jacques Martinod.

"We all have experiences of storms to a greater or lesser extent. When I first heard the recording of the storm in the Moroccan Agafay Desert, I started thinking about the times I had been in a storm. From dramatic storms across central Australia, monsoons in South-east Asia or lightning storms across the sea at my home of Portobello, Edinburgh. However, I kept coming back to the storms I experien...

This is a field recording of a storm in the Agafay desert in Morocco. Listen to the sounds of the rain pitter pattering and the loud frightening thunder rumble, accompanied by birds tweeting in the background.  Recorded by Jake Edwards. 

"What ultimately happened to flight KL1760 Bremen-Paris...? "You hear the flight announcement at the airport, but things quickly spiral out of control. You also hear a reworking of the sound in the Musique Concrete style. A reporter's voice covering an attack in Paris, cinematic sound, and music building to a climax. A lingering Big Bang strikes the listener deep in the ears. "The whole piece was...

Binaural recording of ambience in a mostly quiet terminal at Bremen Airport Hans Koschnick, with frequent announcements in both German and English.  Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

This recording is from the beginning of 2025. I made the recording thru my open window, at the place I'm staying in Berlin (Kreuzberg neighbourhood). There are many church bells in this neighborhood. It's very distinctive to hear the bells in this area. Recorded by Kathleen Judge. 

"I created this piece using my Agricultural Terrains compositional strategy for granular synthesis. It seemed appropriate as the bells encouraged me to reflect on the historical and agricultural connections created through German settlement and its influence on South Australian viticulture. The work explores the distance between places, time and memory itself." Bells in Kreuzberg, Berlin reimagine...

"The recording of the Sufi flute at Istanbul Airport immediately brought back vivid memories of the city, which I deeply love. The Sufi melody carries that magical and mystical aura that seems to permeate Istanbul in every corner and atmosphere, an air filled with scents and spices, suspended in time between an indelible past and contemporary urban modernity. Yet over the fascination of this contr...

Sufi flute player, playing live in Istanbul Airport during Ramadan. Recorded by Helen Copnall.

The jingling of cowbells, the bleating of goats and the whispering voice of the shepherd during milking at a family farmyard in Cercados de Araña, a living testimony of the sustainable living practices of a rural family from the area.  Recording by Marina Díaz Medina, president of the Asociación de Propietarios Los Cercados. Part of the participatory sound mapping project "Voices and Sounds of the...

"My approach was to explore various parts of the recording through the use of destructive looping, granular synthesis and sequencing to create a layered piece that moves through aspects of noise, drone, tape loops and experimental.  "The piece was live recorded on an iPhone with automation of some effect parameters, playing instruments and adjusting effects." Goat milking in Cercados de Arana reim...

"In the spirit of the original piece I combined it with my recordings of clocks and automata and music boxes, my daughter singing with pigeons, and an evening birdsong chorus in Aldeburgh to create a synthesis of the mechanical and the environment." Museum of Automata, Lyon reimagined by Mary Hooper. IMAGE: Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR < https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/fr/deed.en >,...

A recording from Number One Court at the famous Wimbledon tennis championship as Barbora Krecjikova plays against Danielle Collins in a tense match.  Krecjikova would go on not only to win this match, but to be crowned Wimbledon champion just a few days after this match.  Collins 1-5 Krecjikova, second set, 8 July 2024 recorded by Cities and Memory. 

"I composed this piece using guitar and effects pedals plus Ipad instruments to create metaphorical sounds of bouncing, spinning, sliding tennis balls. "The bouncing beats support the progress of the match even during the quieter moments as the players steady their nerves. The musical notes represent tennis balls hit with topspin, deftly dropped, lobbed or craftily sliced with varied pace all befo...

An archive of a Wander through the Museum of Automata, Lyon, before its closure in 2022. Among the ticking gears and rehearsed gestures, a choreography of mechanisms unfolds — echoes of human rhythm, routine, and repetition. Each automaton moves with precision, yet without pulse. Their silent labor mirrors our own patterns, written like a musical score of society. A dance of cold bodies, turning e...

"“Distant Songs” was inspired by the field recording “Archive of a Wander through the Museum of Automata, Lyon” by Florent Picollet. I began my process by eq’ing and editing the field recording into three overlapping sections. The new track was stretched using Paul’s Extreme Sound Stretch and then processed and performed in Ableton. Lastly, Casio tones were added. " Museum of Automata, Lyon reimag...

The slats in the Golden Gate bridge will resonate at certain wind speeds and directions. the first is a low-pitched + low-frequency tone between 280-700hz created by westward ~22mph winds while the second tone is of a higher pitch + frequency of 1.1khz created by ~27mph winds.  This is the singing as heard from Lone Mountain, during a rainy night. Recorded by wwjd (Jason Talsma).

"I used the original ethereal recording to run through the entire piece while also finding and recording a few more Golden Gate bridge sounds. These include the fog horns coming in as the melody and a couple others nearby the bridge. :The field recording inspires a warped sense of reality... dreary... a bit crazy. The bridge is a passage for those marching into a city of multiple faces and realiti...

"My background as a singer/songwriter often dictates how I start my work, but my affinity for experimental music helps to push my compositions into odd or unusual places. "For this composition, The Lech Waltz, I created a simple structure. And yet, it was missing something. "That’s when I decided to push the entire song a minute or more down the timeline, adding a number of layers and then playing...

"In “Out of the Woods” new and old swirl together. The primary inputs are field recordings from a violin workshop near the river. All of the percussion sounds come from the wood instrument construction sounds from the workshop. The rhythms were already so compelling, I took long clips of them and did very little processing. The voices are also all from the workshop visit, in the field recording. V...

"Rushing currents, echoing depths — where the haunting calls of water spirits appear and dissolve like currents in motion. "This dramatic, immersive soundscape was inspired by Riccardo Fumagalli’s field recording captured at Section 5 of the Lech River at Stanzach, Austria, “where the river bed is at its largest and the water caresses the vegetation around it”. Here the river has been braided, div...

"The inspiration from this piece was firstly at the surface level - flow, time, motion - are all inspiring for musical exploration. As I dug deeper into the material, the concept of rivers as enablers to civilization, to history, added deeper layers to explore - how rivers slowly but inexorably shape ideas, stories, culture and music just the same as they shape land and place. "I wanted to bring a...

"This segment is sort of ambiguous - am I listening to the Lech or to the Danube? Maybe both, or maybe it’s all Danube, and “Lech” is just what we called it before it got there. I worked on that moment, and I looked at what that could mean for the river water, which had come from all these different places, with all these different sounds.  "One of the included photos is a bird’s eye view of the t...

"Living in Scotland and spending time in the Scottish Highlands, it is clear to me how integral water and waterways are to the landscape and existence. I sense that humanity has all but forgotten this. There seems to be a belief that we can treat these precious ecosystems in any way we see fit without a care that we may be harming or killing them. When I first heard the recording of the Lech River...