The sounds of industry today, as new contributor Grey Frequency offers a field recording of construction working going on in Nottingham, England – and reimagines it in a suitably industrially-focused manner, as he explains here, using the evocative term ‘mechanical tinnitus’:

“For the reimagined soundscape it seemed natural to create something that sounded very industrial.”

“The whirring, clanging and clattering of machinery was already in place, but I wanted to make everything sound more heavy and laboured.”

“Difficult. Painful. Mechanical tinnitus. Something that hinted at the destruction caused by the fire before.”

“I wanted to create a feeling that while this spectacular construction was being rebuilt, the site was still haunted by memories of cracked charcoal, broken glass and blackened metal.”

“To create the soundscape I dubbed small sections of the digital field recording onto homemade cassette loops. Each section was then played through a series of guitar pedals and fed into a portastudio.”

“More layers of sound were committed to tape and played from a series of personal cassette players. Everything was finally recorded through a small mixer into my laptop. From digital to analogue, then back to digital again.”

City version:

 

Memory version: