Birmingham New Street station – as remixed by Kraftwerk

Passing through airports and stations while travelling always throws up the fascinating sounds of transit and transportation – while many of the sounds of stations and airports can be generic, often you’ll hear things unique to that country or to that city. Here we pay a trip to Birmingham New Street rail station in the West Midlands, and the recording is placed by the accent of the platform announcer, with a Brummie twang unmistakeable for anyone from the UK.

Here, Tim Waterfield has imagined the platform announcements as a slab of train techno, fitting them over a drum track that emulates the sound of a train in full motion – a field recording tribute to Kraftwerk’s ‘Trans-Europe Express’ that also conveys the sense of chaos and bustle of a station. You can almost image sped-up, time-lapse footage of people going about their business on the platforms in hyperspeed as you listen to his dramatic, musical reworking of how the station sounded to him.

City version:

Memory version: