Call to prayer – a duet for Jupiter-8 and muezzin

On Cities and Memory you can hear the beautiful sound of a call to prayer from places including Morocco, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia – with some beautiful reimagined versions.

This is another call to prayer from Saudi Arabia, this time outside a mosque in central Riyadh.

Here, the muezzin’s call to prayer is unusually stop-start, continuing with repeated short phrases over a few minutes, while in the background you can hear the bustle of a capital city settling into its evening at sunset.

City version:

For the reimagined piece, we’ve taken the stop-start nature of the call to prayer as a starting point, and wanted to highlight something of the disjointed staccato feel, but also the sense of calm generated by the simple act of repetition.

We’ve limited ourselves to one instrument, the Jupiter-8 synth, creating a series of repetitive notes that enter into a dialogue with the muezzin’s call, depicting what this particular sonic experience felt like to us as we were recording it.

Memory version: