Over years of field recording, we’ve often pondered the question ‘what makes a field recording special?’ Just what is it that elevates one recording from the everyday to something that makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck? In this two-part series, we ask fifteen notable field recordists from all over the […]
“The Galloanserae Experimental Ensemble has a long tradition of playing challenging experimental music. The Ensemble is the longest running musical group of its type, celebrating its 500th anniversary this year! It was originally founded by three extraordinary hens who found they had a particularly honed sense of the concords and discords of sound.”
Here in the current hometown of Cities and Memory, there’s an annual traditional celebration called May morning, which goes back hundreds of years. Crowds gather at sunrise beneath the tower at Magdalen College to hear the college choir sing hymns from the top of the tower, out across the city.
One of the most frequently-asked questions we get from musicians, artists and curious visitors approaching Cities and Memory for the first time is ‘how do I go about reimagining a sound?’ or ‘what does remixing a field recording actually mean?’. It’s a perfectly valid question, of course – one person’s interpretation of what this could […]
Following hot on the heels of our Hamburg-based album Erinnerungen an eine Stadt, we’re pleased to offer up the first in (hopefully) a series of free downloads highlighting the very best of Cities and Memory. It’s been quite a first year for us, with 60 contributors, sounds spread across 23 countries and more than 150,000 listens […]
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"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands. A description of [the city] as it is today should contain all [the city's] past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the bags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls."
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Grand Prix winner and Coup de Coeur winner, Académie Charles Cros
