Cities and Memory: review of the year 2019
This has been a big year for Cities and Memory, and for our contributors all over the world. We’ve taken the number of countries on our sound map up to an amazing ninety, broken the barrier of one million listens to sounds in the project, launched four brand new projects – and even Cities and Memory as a live performance:
Here’s a rundown of our 2019:
2019 project: Space is the Place
Space is the Place was a project to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Moon landings by releasing and reimagining a unique collection of sounds spanning the history of space travel to ask “what does space sound like?”.
It was covered by the likes of The Guardian, BBC Radio 4, The Wire, Late Junction and many others.
2019 project: Yellowstone
Our Yellowstone project took a close look at the sounds of the oldest and most famous national park in the world, with brilliant reimagined sounds of everything from wolves and coyotes to the world-famous geysers such as Old Faithful – a real treat for nature lovers.
2019 project: Three Words
Three Words was our final major project of 2019 – using the three-word location code from the amazing what3words mapping tool as inspiration for recompositions, the project was about the power of words applied to the beauty of sound.
2019 marked the birth of Cities and Memory as a live performance, with three live show in which we performed some of the highlights of the project. Our debut show was with Can legend Damo Suzuki, and we closed the year with a show in Bristol, UK – keep your eyes peeled for more Cities and Memory live shows coming in 2020. We’ve already got a couple of surprises planned!
We’re very proud to have released six albums this year – as well as highlights from our Space is the Place, Yellowstone and Three Words projects, which you can find over at our Bandcamp page, there was also the second volume of our collection of beautiful ambient sounds, and our end of year roundup album showing off some of the very best of 2019’s reimagined sounds.
As per our annual tradition, we asked some of our regular contributors to tell us which sounds tools and musical gadgets had been lighting up their world this year – with samples from pieces on our sound map so you can hear them in action.
As we do every year, we also took the time to review our listening habits over the previous 12 months, so here’s our top 20 favourite albums from 2019 – sure to be a few things in here worth checking out, we hope!
A huge and heartfelt THANK YOU to the hundreds of you all over the world who have contributed to the project this year – Cities and Memory could not exist without you. Find out more about our incredible contributors over here.
A very happy, productive and sound-filled 2020 to everyone!
