Today we can hear the oldest recording in our Protest and Politics project, and one of the earliest recordings on Cities and Memory. Going back to January 1991, here’s a protest in Washington DC against the first Gulf War, two days after the commencement of the US-led air war against Iraq, recorded by Tom Miller. […]
“In this mix, sounds of the bustling contemporary underground station blend with static carrying traces of the ghosts of the First World War, from the excitement and good-byes of leaving for the front to the poison gas bombardment and carnage of trench warfare.”
After a month of exploring some fascinating sonic approaches to Utopia, our journey has finally come to a close. To mark the occasion, today we’re launching a FREE ALBUM of Utopia sounds. We’ve chosen twelve highlights that we think flow together as an album and a listening experience, as well as representing some of the many approaches taken to imagining Utopia in sound.
“”Thin Cities is a soundscape built around archival tape of Italo Calvino reading in English and Italian from his books Invisible Cities and Mr. Palomar. Field recordings from Venice, Brooklyn, Alaska and elsewhere are combined with electrically generated long tones to create an imaginary Utopian sonic environment for the ebb and flow of the author’s words.”
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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
