Metronomics – on the Beijing metro
A trip on the Beijing metro today, courtesy of a field recording by Mark Wilden, who captured his ride on subway line 1 between Guomao and Dawanglu stations on the city’s metro system – a slice of the character of travelling around this enormous city.
The reimagined Beijing metro is taken entirely from the field recording, with all the processing applied to sections of the original to produce pulsing rhythms and clicks, arpeggiated rhythms, vocodered synth lines and manipulated station announcements.
The piece is called “Metronomics” for its musical development of the metro’s natural rhythms, and for pleasing wordplay reasons too:
City version:
Memory version:
