Cities and Memory - remixing the world

• Naja haje: the way knows the way

  "Naja haje: the way knows the way honours the Egyptian cobra as a guide across myth, land, and memory. Inspired by ancestral ties to Morocco and our life in the Pacific Northwest, we entered into dialogue with the field recording—looping rhythm, layering voice, chalumeau, recorder, and drum—to explore how sound can restore relationships with the more-than-human world.  The piece asks how honouring the serpent—through tending to habitat, safety, and community—can help heal the self. Marrakech traditional music soundscape reimagined by The Binary Marketing Show (Abram Morphew & Bethany Carder).

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• Spirituary

  "Where does humanity presently sit in terms of faith, spirituality and striving for greatness?  |Our recorded history manifests as a unified drive toward the divine. Modern existentialism folds in elements of increased division and loss of direction on the path to fulfilment. "We live in an era that measures progression and success with an obsessive focus on wide-spread improvement at every level. Yet, when we look at examples of achievements in history, we feel an unnerving disconnect that we cannot define. We have a need to engage with true greatness. Increasingly though, it is a shadow of the past. "This piece reimagines the sonic artifacts from this sacred and inspiring cathedral space from the field recording and presents it as a remake for modern consumption. Something that, on the surface, implies a betterment of sorts. But also suggests that perhaps not all is as it should be.  Catedral Basílica, Santiago de Compostela reimagined by Gerald Fratzl.

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• Mist over delay fields

  "The track was built around a single, imperfect moment in time: a field recording I captured while walking through a tunnel by the main market. You can hear distant voices trading words, footsteps, fragments of conversations and the natural reverb of the tunnel itself. That recording became the spine of the piece – I didn’t treat it as background noise, but as the main “instrument”. "I started by isolating the most atmospheric sections of the recording, then layered and looped them so the voices and echoes slowly morph into a constant, breathing texture. Multiple delays with different feedback times smear the sounds into long, ghostly trails, while deep reverbs exaggerate the tunnel’s natural space and push everything further into an ambiguous, dreamlike distance. "From there, I added subtle filtering, pitch shifting and modulation effects to carve movement inside the static drone, so the ambience never sits still. Underneath, a restrained dub techno pulse emerges – low-end hits, soft chords and minimal percussive details – all heavily processed with send delays and tape-style saturation. The result is a slow, hypnotic piece where the original tunnel recording is still recognisable, but transformed into a drifting soundscape: half real-world memory, half submerged, echoing dream." Jingzhou City South Gate sounds reimagined by Yiannis Vlastaris.

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• Jardin remix

  "I wanted to create a musical bed of just the bird vocalizations in the Jardin de Ayora without any instruments so I grabbed different moments in the recording, cutting and looping the parrots, pigeons and some migratory birds in the park. It took me some time to create the bed of bird sounds but I knew that I needed some low end emphasis so I introduced a bass drone and some other small, minimalist musical elements. I applied some effects to a couple of the tracks of the singing birds but I left most of the tracks untreated." Jardin de Ayora, Valencia reimagined by Bill McKenna.

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• Tre visi

  ‘Tre Visi’ explores the sonic identity of Treviso, Italy, anchoring itself in a field recording of the city’s Fontana delle Tre Facce (Fountain of the Three Faces). The piece explores the ambiguity of the city’s history and the debate between its potential ‘Three Hills’ Latin etymology and its Celtic origins. The production includes processed samples from a Celtic-like vocal melody alongside the fountain's texture, creating a new space for three voices to navigate an expansive aural space of possibilities. Sample credits: ’Chorus 1’ by Valerie-Vivegnis  Fontana dei Tre Visi, Treviso reimagined by Luca Nasciuti.

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