Cities And Memory

A peaceful Monday morning in Bremen's Buergerpark, with plentiful birdsong, and the occasional jogger and cyclist passing us on a sunny May morning.  Recorded in May 2025 by Cities and Memory. 

Parks draw elderly crowds, each with unique soundscapes shaped by distinct groups, hard to discover without local insight. This recording was a lucky find. Guanqian Park, a refined roadside garden, hosts elderly chess players in tight-knit groups, clearly familiar.  Some laugh, others argue heatedly, slapping chess pieces in excitement, creating a lively buzz. Onlookers watch quietly with poised restraint, embodying Suzhou’s cultured folk spirit. Unexpectedly found in a roadside park. Recorded by Digimonk.

Jiwei Cun is a small village in Liangshan Mountains of Sichuan province, China. They are Yi nationality. The local people have pigs, cows and chickens in backyards, under trees. Yi is very very old tribes in history. Because of the mountains, they're a mystery. Recorded by Digimonk.

Teahouses were once hubs of socializing, business, and leisure in towns along the Yangtze, akin to British pubs or Shanghai’s 1990s eateries. At Jiaotong Teahouse, most patrons are retired local men, much like their ancestors a century ago. They trickle in around 5 a.m., chatting, playing cards, chess, or sipping tea under dim wooden beams and brick walls, with scarcely a sound from phones or devices. Some linger all day, swapping tales from near and far; others head home by noon with vegetables for lunch. Wang Di’s book Teahouse vividly explores the traditional Chengdu teahouse’s role in culture, politics, and society—a history and voice of ordinary people. Recorded in Chongqing by Digimonk.

" Although sampled, processed, arranged then processed,reprocessed and arranged again, the sound of the stream still persists." Sa Pa, Vietnam water sounds reimagined by Alex Vald.

"The people in the teahouse were a focal point for my approach to reimagining this sound, I listened to the cadence and rhythm of conversations and clattering of cups and found a melody, chopped up the audio to accentuate the melody, dialed in some synths and lo-fi drums to act as the vehicle for that melody and took it some weird and wonderful places, here are some interesting points from the piece: "I wanted to include some nods to China in this piece, the gongs at the beginning and end, the mandarin phrases which were "Begin" "Breakdown" and "The End" and the slightly more hidden one in the form of a modulated recording of a Chinese water goose in the breakdown at the end. "I wanted the whole thing to feel like you were listening to a record so there's a vinyl recording throughout the whole thing and a needle on and off sound at either end." Chongqing tea house reimagined by Gary Pitt.

"Floating Sediments is a work that uses sounds from a market in Iquitos, Peru. The voices of vendors and customers, fragments of music, and everyday murmurs are extracted through spectral processes to reconfigure this landscape within an expanded temporality. Through synthesis, modulations of speed and pitch, resonances, and reverberations, a state of persistence is suggested, of traces that fix and vanish in a space of their own. "The work is a collage of vocal layers, displaced textures, and imagined presences. Synthesizers are also incorporated to add harmonic color, creating a sonic fabric that oscillates between memory and transformation into an imagined acoustic territory." Iquitos, Peru soundscape reimagined by Jorge Martínez Valderrama.

"The original field recording by Colin Hunter is a layered feast of distinctive sounds - bells ringing, unusual whistles, vendors shouting short phrases repeatedly, people softly laughing and a baby trying out words. I've taken seven of these sounds and set them in opposition to the same sounds found in other places. At times they are swamped, at other times they blend and form a new audio relationship." Molenbeek market, Belgium reimagined by Chris Lillywhite.

"The sounds of Sanqiba Alley in Nanjing reminded me of living in Nanjing several years ago, and the sense of the history of this place and its people was really strong. The piece draws on the sounds of conversations and food preparations to suggest a moment that is rooted in time and is also timeless in a way." Nanjing old town reimagined by Wayne DeFehr.

" used the prominent sound of the bells to explore polyrhythms and basic sound effects such as pitch and timing alteration, and reversing. I structured it so that the rhythm is established, then altered, then becomes chaotic, then gives way to more melodic and coherent material. The harshness of sound and the wedding bells are a micro structure, briefly explored." Oslo wedding bells reimagined by Patrick Duffy.

"I like to push myself beyond my comfort zones so as an exercise in avoiding my biases I asked Stuart to choose a sound for me. It's almost as if he knew! Stuart gave me a sound recording of seagulls that really challenged me. It was a difficult sound to work with because it has a very narrow tonal range and was quite repetitive. I found that surprising for a natural sound.  "All of the sounds in this composition have been derived from the original field recording." Gulls in Lofoten reimagined by Robert Gillespie.

"I was inspired by the guttural sounds of the animals roaring. I decided to investigate the detail of these by slowing the material down. I then layered different components and added plugins including comb filtering, space grain and evolution. The resultant audio suggested to me how it might sound if you were a small creature swallowed by a predator." Jiwei village, China reimagined by Alison Beattie.

"While listening to this composition I am imagining walking mindfully through a park and feeling centred and contemplative. I used the whole field recording, applied different effects and made the accompanying synth lines while imagining I was in the park." Buergerpark, Bremen reimagined by Eden Grey.

"Starting with a recording from Baltimore airport, I created a contrast between nature and the urban environment. My goal is to highlight how we have become accustomed to the artificial noises of the city, ending up almost completely ignoring the sounds of nature. This composition is intended as an invitation to listen to them carefully again." Baltimore station reimagined by Samuele Arcudi.

"In protests many voices join together, sounding to create a powerful opposition, echoing through physical and mental spaces. This piece recalls mass protests, recorded by Daniel Beaudoin, in response to the 2023 Tempi train crash in Greece caused by gross negligence and followed by corrupt coverups.  "Granular textures crafted from this recording and other protests I've recorded embrace and support these voices of unrest, acting as an amplification of the opposition to injustice experienced in this instance and others. Repetitions of moments in time chanting out, disrupting the peace while fighting to not be silenced, creating a contradicting cacophony.  "Cacophony is a word with Greek origins, κακοφωνία (kakophōnía), from κακός (kakós, “bad”) + φωνή (phōnḗ, “sound”). The sounds of the protest are not bad, but instead represent a coalition of communities calling attention to the negative actions surrounding us and for the destruction of oppressive forces, demanding a new arrangement. Don't let them be sile

"I liked that the original file showcased people enjoying their leisure time playing games and talking freely while the world went on by. I found it relaxing and peaceful. It made me think of how time passes us by, and how generations come and go - the cycle of life. So I wanted something repetitive and cyclical, yet relaxing. This inspired the waving synth drone.  "I used outboard gear for all of these sounds - which was a first for me. I always like to learn something new when I create something - and used a glitch box to distort the sound of one of my synths. It is responsible for the noise. We are surrounded by noise, and noise is something I wanted to have in the piece. It represents the things we can't make sense of, and perhaps shouldn't ever try to. Just get on with the stuff we know, and enjoy what we can while we are here.  "I played to a friend and he imagined it was like a cat slowing waking up to the world around it. Hence the title."  Guanqian Park, Suzhou reimagined by Ben Scott.

"This composition is based on an ambisonic recording made inside the Sauna at Auschwitz. This was the ‘bathhouse’ where new arrivals from the trains arriving at the camp were stripped of all their belongings, valuables and clothes, registered and tattooed with a number, then showered, shaved, disinfected and re-clothed. The building had a “clean” and a “dirty” side, and machines were used to steam and delouse clothing. Existing prisoners were also sometimes sent to the Sauna in attempts to control pests and disease in the camp. "As Andrzej Strzelecki describes in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum book about the Auschwitz Sauna, the purpose of this place had little to do with caring for prisoners’ hygiene. Instead, it acted as an instrument in the Nazis’ system of mass destruction and theft of the property of groups targeted in pursuit of their racist ideology. The sauna was also a site of ritual humiliation, dehumanisation and control, stripping people of their dignity. Most new arrivals believed they were being

Ambisonics recordings of the acoustics inside the "Sauna" in Auschwitz, where the prisoners were disinfected, shaved, stripped of their clothes and their valuables and tattooed with a number. Same acoustics today as in 1942. Recorded by Anders Vinjar.

At VFB Oldenburg vs. Luebeck, 9 May 2025 (final score: 0-2). An impressively large section of ultras for a small club in Germany's fourth division, marshalled by a leader with a megaphone. This is a passage of Oldenburg fans songs underpinned by drumming to keep everyone energised and in time.  Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

"I asked for a random field recording to let chance guide my ear. What arrived resonated: unmistakably urban, shaped by the pulse of a collective ritual. In the voices of the Vfb Oldenburg Ultras chants I heard an expression of joy and working-class culture, a liturgy sung by a secular choir. Lower division football provides an inclusive space where local cultural identity and community can be celebrated. The glamour needs to be homegrown on a wet midweek evening, when your team is losing (again). This sense of community is often more inspiring than the display on the pitch. It also helped that they share the blue and white stripes of my own club. "The piece draws solely from the original recording, its sounds stretched and looped across four tapes, long and short fragments circling one another. Overdrive, echo, resonators, and reverb shape the texture, sharpening some edges, dissolving others to emphasise and blend. I let the voices and rhythms guide the process, leaving them ‘visible’ throughout, figures p