Nine bells in Cortina d’Ampezzo

A welcome return to the Italian Alps for Cities and Memory, and the ski resort town of Cortina d’Ampezzo, base camp for some of the most amazing walks and climbs in the Dolomites.

On a quiet August evening, the town is unusually very quiet, with barely a handful of people around.

It’s a perfect time to hear the sound of the town’s church bells, combined with that very particular reverberation and air quality of mountain towns. A beautiful sound.

For the reimagined sound, we’ve constructed an ambient drone piece from the very sounds of the bells themselves.

Nine pulses throb in and out of existence in this piece, one for every chime of the church bells ringing nine o’clock.

These pulses have been augmented with piano, strings, ondes martenot and various synths, all filtered and effected to preserve their warm tones, but to render them less recognisable and more dreamlike.

City version:

Memory version: