The latest Cities and Memory project launches today, 13th August, featuring dozens of recomposed and re-imagined sounds everywhere from the Dolomites in the North to the beaches of Sicily in the South.
You can explore the sounds on an interactive sound map on the Cities and Memory website. I can’t embed the map here unfortunately, just a screenshot:
There are an excellent range of styles, some of my favourites so far are ‘The Imagination of Mythology’, an evolving drone / soundscape with just an edge of distortion and distant voices; ‘Blue Summer Dream’ has a strong theme of bells and water with contrasting distorted / bitcrushed sounds that add an excellent tension; ‘Deliverence’ is an atmospheric, haunting soundscape with subtle movement and great build and release of tension; ‘Prosecco Festival Pause’ is an excellent glitchy, cut-up, tape loop type of sound. There are still many more to discover.
My entry is a re-imagining of a crowd recording from an Inter Milan vs Lazio football match at the iconic San Siro Stadium.
I’ve made extensive use of the joggle sampler in Sensomusic Usine Hollyhock 3. This is a sampler with a speed control (-400% to 400%) that I’ve assigned to a midi controller to start / stop several instances of the sampler and adjust the playback speed.
I created three live recordings using parts of the recording in the joggle sampler, grain cloud sampler and groove slicer in Hollyhock 3 as well as in Palindrome VST by Glitchmachines that are processed with a number of Eventide effects – Mangled Verb, Blackhole, Octavox, Ultratap, H3000 Factory Delay, H949 Dual Harmoniser.
I’ve used the start of the original recording layered against orchestration and bass (Olafur Arnalds Chamber Evolutions by Spitfire Audio) with the three live recordings substituted for the original recording to create the track.
