“I’ve always found musical processions to be quite magical, mesmerizing experiences – everything else seems to grind to a halt as they pass by… as if time beyond the parade slows to a crawl. Combining this thought with the deep symbolism behind the idea of Corpus Christi I decided to try and create something quite mystical, but still with a hint of that pageant passing by the listener.”
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 […]
Our first stop once the rain has cleared up (temporarily – this is Hamburg, after all!) is the Rathausmarkt, home of the town hall, one of Hamburg’s most distinctive and famous buildings. The Rathaus itself doesn’t sound very interesting, other than the change in sonic atmosphere between the square outside and the huge stone reverb […]
Wherever you go, at least in terms of big cities, one of the most similar-yet-subtly-different sounds is that of the public transport system, simultaneously familiar as daily life to inhabitants and somehow verging on the exotic for visitors. The first time you step onto a metro in a new city, it’s the small differences from […]
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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
