Cities And Memory

A nighttime recording from the Ecuadorian Amazon reveals the hidden world that awakens after dark. Bats flutter overhead, insects create an otherworldly symphony, and distant howls echo through the trees. A gentle stream murmurs beneath it all, weaving a tapestry of life, survival, and mystery. Recorded by Rafael Diogo.

As dawn stretches gently over the bay, the village stirs to life. The soft clatter of fishermen preparing their lines mingles with the playful clinks of children spinning an old bicycle wheel with a bamboo stick — a game as timeless as the tide. Nearby, the metallic hum of the village well echoes through the dusty sand alley, as barefoot kids dash beneath the waking sun. Roosters, curiously late, call out as if surprised by a world already in motion. This is the soundscape of a quiet coastal village in the Philippines — a delicate braid of labour, laughter, and nature — where time unfolds not in hours, but in tides and tradition. Recorded by Rafael Diogo. 

Takeshita Street, located in Harajuku, Tokyo, is a bustling pedestrian-only street known for its fashion boutiques, cafés, and restaurants. In the recording, made in late October 2024, you can hear the sounds of footsteps, lively conversations, and a mix of languages.  This constant flow of people and linguistic diversity reveals the dynamic nature of the street, where the coexistence of so many languages in one place evokes the idea of a contemporary Tower of Babel — a place where different cultures intersect and connect. Recorded by Gus - On Collector.

"When listening to the field recording I kept imagining movement all around me. Then I began going to a darker place where I felt large unseen creatures moving toward me and the feelings of slight panic one might experience in that situation, despite the beauty of natures surroundings. My attempt here was to capture the mood and ambience these thoughts brought forth." Night in the Ecuadorian Amazon reimagined by Gerald Fratzl.

"Takeshita Street is a busy pedestrian street, I've taken a perspective of being someone who is lost in the crowd / distracted by their phone to create an experimental / ambient / glitchy / tape loop track.  "I've used the recording in a number of samplers to create ambience and create those snippets of conversation you tend to hear in passing. It was recorded as a one take live recording on iPhone." Takeshita Street, Tokyo reimagined by Andy Lyon.

"I was inspired by the melancholy and foreboding tone of the bells in direct contrast to the modern chatter like the call of the ancient with the bells dominating the streets almost like they were haunted.  "I used it by picking the tone of that bell and enhancing the eerie, haunting atmospherics, weaving the voices in with it." Midday bells in Hannover reimagined by Julie Woolmore.

"Remix of Malapascua Island Fishing Village field recording merged into music with inspiration from Head Like A Hole by Nine Inch Nails. All samples apart from the main synth sound are from the original recording and used to create drum and percussion sounds as well as ambience."  Malapascua Island reimagined by Gareth Eckley.

"This is a strange pub scene, the kind where all of a sudden you’re inside your own head, as if flashing back years later. The premise came from the first intelligible bit of speech—“It happened so fast”—with flashes of conversation breaking in on that withdrawn mental space, with tones built up from the pub’s background music and the intonation of the language: “it happened so fast,” “the hardest thing,” “watch it,” and especially “all day,” a two-note phrase that became the central rhythm around which everything else holds."  Kelly's Cellars, Belfast reimagined by John Savarese. IMAGE: Albert Bridge / Kelly's Cellars, Belfast

Ambience from inside Kelly's Cellars, a traditional Irish pub in Belfast, including traditional music, pub chatter and the sounds of drinking and general merriment. Recorded in November 2023 by Cities and Memory. IMAGE: Albert Bridge / Kelly's Cellars, Belfast

The dawn chorus of Balgowlah, Sydney, NSW in the midsummer, about 6:30am. I heard kookaburras, cockatoos, lorikeets, magpies, noisy miners and many more, with a few sparse domestic and vehicle sounds as the suburb begins to wake. Recorded by Emma Lambert.

A pre-dawn soundscape dominated by the loud, relentless chorus of frogs, immersing you deeply in the heart of an indigenous community. The sounds get alive as soon as darkness falls, enveloping you in an unbroken, ever-present atmosphere. Deep within the Colombian Amazon, where it meets the Amazonian region of Peru, the vibrant frog calls resonate just before the first light of dawn. Recorded by Rafael Diogo.

I've been recently working with an old non-linear editing system that has a few quirks. Sometimes, the system freezes making my stressful job even more difficult. I could either restart the system or calmly wait until it "unfreezes". The sound you hear - a voice saying "extremely difficult" - is the frozen edit system looping a part of the interview that I'm working on.  I've learned that Instead of getting upset, I simply turn on my audio recorder, walk out of my edit suite, get a cup of coffee in the kitchen, and return with the hope that I can get back to work on my news story. In this case, towards the end of the recording, you can hear that the machine is finally back to normal and I return to my job whereupon the full sentence from the interview unfolds. I find it a bit amusing sometimes and, of course, I love the serendipitous nature of the audio glitch. Recorded in Washington DC by Bill McKenna. 

The Friday market in Ventimiglia, an Italian town on the border with France, is alive with the bustle of French tourists who come weekly to buy goods. The sounds of music, bargaining and laughter fill the air, but there's also an oblivious tension. The Italian police move through the crowd, routinely stopping people — particularly racialized individuals — to ask for documents.  "Permesso di soggiorno, ce l'hai?" ("Do you have a residence permit?") echoes sharply as two Tunisian minors are questioned. In the background, the mechanical tune of a police radio punctuates the scene as the police have a quick casual conversation on Ecuadorians, these voices blend uneasily with the market's lively hum.  Here, the ordinary rhythms of commerce coexist with the heavy presence of surveillance at the border, where every passing moment is marked by an invisible line. You can also here my voice in the background, a light-hearted exchange unfolds—me chatting with a French lady and a sellers from Guinea and Italy, who try

"Rafael Diogo's recording of the Colombian Amazon sounded so rich to me - and rich in a way that evoked certain things that could happen in my modular synthesizer, particularly the kinds of things that happen when I patch up feedback paths through Serge modules.  "So that's what I did. The results interweave various ways of complementing and imitating the selected loops of the original field recording."   Frogs in the Amazon reimagined by Joseph Chaves.

"I was struck by the many underlying tensions of this recording. The racialized profiling described by Masha Hassan—the dual nature of observation, the police surveillance of bodies and Masha's surveillance of them juxtaposed against the vibrancy and music of the open marketplace.  "I wished to highlight those elements through a chopped and edited approach, a kind of digital tape manipulation, first through Eurorack synthesizer, and then further in DAW based editing; looping, sampling, resampling, stretching, and compressing audio.  "While the moments of tension that are so compelling to me in Masha’s original recording may or may not be present in this reimagined piece, I aim to achieve that anxiety on a poetic level in my composition — exactimo."   Friday market in Ventimiglia, Italy reimagined by John Wilhelm.

"The original source recording is from an old sound editing machine that sometimes freezes up on the operator and starts looping at that spot.  "I had plenty of ideas, but after a lot of tinkering I found myself paring it all back until finally I was left with two copies of the exact same snippet endlessly looping, snaking in and out of sync. I was mesmerized by this simple variation of the original spontaneous glitch.  "I tried various effects on either track like panning, filters and EQ, reverb etc. to distinguish them. But ultimately I decided I liked it best unmodified and unadorned, and that it’s not obvious which is doing what. The only editing I did was to decide how long it should be. Two cycles seemed plenty." Washington DC editing machine reimagined by Joel Kaufman.

"I slowed down Emma Lambert's field recording progressively and in layers so the soundspace is a gradual stretching of her field recording. At three quarters of the way to 4min and 8 seconds, the length of the original recording, it is hard to hear the birdsong that is now at about 1 percent. By the end it is at  0.1 percent. The sounds are still there.  "There's a saying that if things change gradually you don't notice. This was the inspiration behind the slow down of Emma Lambert's recording.  "This gradual silencing of the birdsong by slowing down the recording also mimics my own gradual hearing loss. I didn't notice the gradual loss of sound and now with new hearing aids can hear birdsong again:)" Sydney dawn chorus reimagined by Sonja van Kerkhoff.

"The original sound is a recording of Sengoku-yu Public Baths in Tokyo: the owner is a musician. On this particular Monday, three musicians are working to clean the baths; I imagined, in sound, these three spirits bringing music to the place as they clean, like a true Miyazaki story." Baths in Tokyo reimagined by Clelia Ciardulli.

Songs of fishermen retrieving fish trapped in large nets by force of arms. Recorded by Pierre Costard.

"I wanted to do something a bit synthwave / cyberpunk / Blade Runner influenced. The original clip gave me the feeling of night and neon lights. I had the idea to add a punk bassline - which was the first thing I recorded. I then added the drums, guitar and then synths.  "Finally the vocals came, which are satirical. We love to talk about ourselves, but never speak up when it really matters. And, we are slaves to consumerism no matter what we try to think. "I kept the whole piece short despite the temptation to add to the ending." Government announcement in Hanoi, Vietnam reimagined by Wanted Sound (Ben Scott).