Today’s field recording comes from a beautiful spot in Rome, Italy, In this recording we’re taking a tour of the boating lake by the Tempio di Esculapio in the Villa Borghese Park.
A harp busker performs, we walk around the lake listening to passers-by on a Sunday morning in April, and a police helicopter passes overhead.
City version:
The beautiful reimagined version of the Tempio di Esculapio comes from John Savarese, who writes:
“When I heard the field recording I knew I wanted to work with the combination of harp and surrounding ambience. But I kept thinking about the scene-the Villa Borghese gardens, on the site of the ancient gardens of Lucullus, in terms of its temporal layers: the gardens, the recreated temple of Asklepios, and harp as a complicated symbol that usually gestures toward some version of a musical past.
“That sent me down a rabbit hole that involved researching and building replicas of an ancient Roman style cithara and an ancient Greek chelis-style lyre, which are the two main plucked instruments you can hear in the track. The cithara has a clean, guitar-like sound, while the lyre has slacker strings that buzz against the bridge. The majority of the pad-like sounds are also samples of those instruments, along with harps, electric guitar, and a low helicopter drone.”
Memory version:
