It’s National Poetry Day on 1 October, so to mark the occasion, we thought we’d bring together a few occasions on which poetry has been absolutely central to how an artist has reimagined the sounds of the world – when a poem is at the heart of a recomposed piece,
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll run through the fantastic entries to our Prison Songs project, letting each of the songs breathe and putting them under the spotlight. We’ll also give the artists involved the chance to tell you how and why they approached the song as they did.
Seville, Spain – midday bells ring out across the rooftops of the old town. In the reimagined version of the sound, a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘The Bells’ sits at the centre, using the words of the poem as a literal reflection of the sounds, and creating an evocative soundscape in the process.
Our #Hamburgsounds project has come to a close after a terrific success, so for our next Cities and Memory stop, let’s go quite a bit further afield – to a village in Rwanda, in fact. Luke Henrion collected this field recording while visiting a project run by the charity Oxfam,
