Can one place be two sonic environments at the same time?

Published on: 13th May 2014 Published in: Cities & Memory

Today’s post comes from the lovely rural location where the band I play in rehearse every week – a little Oxfordshire village called Cumnor. The rehearsal room overlooks some nice rolling English countryside. Turning up early one week, I recorded two sounds from the same location – one is the sound of the church bells from the village drifting down towards me, with a car arriving midway through. The second is the industrial throb of a large external generator that sits outside the rehearsal rooms. For the remix, I’ve blended the two sounds together in a crossfade, so one sounds becomes the other and you can experience one part of the same location effectively becoming the other part, starting with the mechanical pulse of a generator, and slowly letting in the light of more typical rural sounds until the recording ends in peace.