Remixing the Barbican, from the inside out

I’m pretty pleased with this one. On a trip to London I had some time to kill, so popped into the Barbican Centre, which (if you don’t know) is a huge arts and music centre with a large open plan space at its heart, where sounds from different floors and different rooms blend into each other and flow in and out. It’s not much of a looker from the inside (or indeed the outside), but it’s a fascinating sonic environment. I got lucky with my field recording, capturing a cleaner hoovering part of the venue bleeding into a TV advertising upcoming concerts, which contained snippets of beautiful piano melody popping in and out of the recording. I consider the field recording lovely on its own, not least because the sound of hoovering has an automatic, almost Pavlovian sleep response for me – I find the sound of hoovers extremely relaxing to the point of sleep-inducing, so for me to hear this alongside the piano melody was a treat.

For the remix I’ve tried to take the soporific, dreamy elements of the hoovering sound and how it affects me, and weave in the fact that there were snatches of melody coming through in the recording as well – the result is this little two minute drone piece, which I hope you’ll like.

City version:

Memory version:

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