Cities And Memory

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

"Duality draws from the resonant tolling of church bells. The work explores how a single sound can hold opposing states—deep yet relaxing, weighty yet weightless. The bells become a meditation on perception itself: their meaning shaped not by acoustic properties alone, but by the listener's inner state. In their reverberations lies a paradox resolved only in stillness." Bremerhaven bell sounds reimagined by Bruce Nemeth.

Church bells ring for 1pm at the Buergermeister-Smidt-Gedaechtniskirche, Bremerhaven, Germany, as police sirens sound in the background. Recorded in May 2025 by Cities and Memory. 

Underwater sounds, the sound of waves on the sea, the vibration of wires to prevent falls, these are recorded. The sound of a titmouse playing on the wire is also included in the recording. Recorded 28.01.2025, 4:43pm by Miduno. 

Soundscape of buzzing bees in a field in Leknes, Norway. Recorded by Agapi Zita. 

Cousins Ave forest has been enjoyed by walkers, joggers and cyclists for decades. I regularly take my dog into the forest for a long run. Several weeks ago I arrived and found barriers erected as harvesting was commencing. I found a spot to sit and listen to the sounds of destruction in what was once a place of serenity.  This recording captures the sounds of machinery reducing a once serene forest to slash - a term used to describe the material left behind after trees are harvested. Not only has the forest been lost to the local community but it is has been lost to the local wildlife. It is rumoured that once harvesting is complete the land will be used for a new housing development. Recorded in Foxton Beach, New Zealand by Paul Dunham. 

"This piece was inspired by the global issue of flooding. It includes extracts from the work of the 19th C English poet, John Clare (reading by Ian King for Librivox - PD). In the final clip of the poem, the words are eventually overwhelmed by The Flood.  "There is also acknowledgement of the origin of the field recording, with the inclusion of samples of Japanese traditional instruments." Hakkeijima Island underwater sounds reimagined by Nick St. George.

"The melodic and maybe even slightly forlorn sound of the bees made me want to include them as a layer in a moody instrumental piece so they became a low key pseudo horn part in a band which also features tuned stereo geophone recordings of me playing a hotel room balcony and claves recorded in the same hotel room. " I was staying in a small quiet village where the usual background car hum of the city I live in was absent and the bees reminded me of the more prominent sounds of nature there."  Leknes bee sounds reimagined by Andy Taylor.

Bleach: to lose colour. The recording of the Foxton Beach deforestation is transposed in a process of timbre decolorization. Using the original recording as a musical score, my compositional process puts emphasis on the degradation of the natural ecosystem by degrading sound and timbre elements.  The result is a broken and ruined imaginary landscape where only a few synthetic sound survives.  Foxton Beach forest soundscape reimagined by Nicola Cappelletti.

"When choosing the field recording to work with, I was particularly drawn to a field recording of nocturnal amphibians from Pantuase, Ghana, featuring a species of frog that, until recently, had not been recorded before. The recording was made within a designated natural park, which was established both to protect species from pollution created by local industry and mining, and also to provide a place for tourists to visit. "What interested me most was the sense of nature existing independently of human presence, often unnoticed. I was also interested in the idea that, when human activity fades, nature will very quickly reclaim a space. "The composition is created mainly using modular synthesis and is structured to reflect these themes. The piece begins with the field recording, representing the existence of the natural world before the emergence of human influence. Gradually, the natural soundscape is is distorted and reduced until it becomes inaudible. However, its influence continues via the use of an en

Pantuase is a new wetland location added to two other wetland locations namely Trom and Bonya which were previously recorded in 2021 and 2022. Those tonal frogs heard in the recording have never been acoustically captured so i was amazed by these unique sounds they were making when the recordings were sent to me.  Since then, I keep asking myself how the place would have sounded like had it been left intact. The fate of nature in this place is unknown and can be lost at any point in time, therefore the recordings are being used to monitor/observe as well as archive diverse “remnant” species there and finally, as a tool for raising awareness about fragile ecosystems. Recorded by Emmanuel Baffoe, 13th November 2024. 

At night, in a bamboo grove in Kyoto, the wind threads its way through the tall stalks, bending them until they sway and knock together with hollow tones. The sound is both delicate and immense — a shifting chorus of rattles, sighs, and murmurs that rise and fall like waves. Each gust carries a new texture: sometimes a low, resonant moan as the bamboo bows deeply, sometimes a fine, trembling hiss as leaves brush against one another in countless, shimmering layers.  In the stillness between, silence feels almost physical — a pause that makes each return of the wind seem like a hidden spirit passing through. The grove itself becomes an instrument, played by the night air. Here, the boundary between sound and silence blurs, and the listener can feel the earth breathing in long, slow rhythms through the voice of the wind. Recorded in Kyoto, Japan by Rafael Diogo.

Inside the Klimahaus museum, which is dedicated to telling the stories of climate and the environment. The exhibition called "The Journey" takes you around the world on a line of longitude from Bremerhaven with interactive installations and exhibits that make extensive use of sound to be as immersive as possible. Here we are in Niger, experiencing a video installation based on desert village life.  Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

A recording of Holy Communion taking place in the iconic surroundings of Westminster Abbey, with the service audible both from the priest directly and piped through the surrounding speakers, as tourists pass the worshippers on all sides, and the epic reverb of the space threatens to swallow up everything in the soundscape.  Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

"This raw desert field recording, resonating from the halls of the Klimahaus Bremerhaven in Germany (Climate House Museum Bremerhaven), sparked a vision of musical imagination within me.  "It drew me into a hidden world of untold stories, and from its pulse and breath, I shaped a soundscape I call Meridian. A sonic journey tracing the secret heart of the desert and revealing an oasis born of imagination. "I chose to keep the original field recording largely untouched, aside from a few subtle adjustments to its timeline. Rather than altering it, I composed around the field recording, employing gentle musical techniques, layered resonance, micro-harmonic drifting, and slow spectral unfolding so that the environment itself becomes the primary instrument. "As the piece unfolds, the distant cries of unseen creatures, the soft patter of rain, and the quiet exhalation of wind emerge in deepening layers. From these textures, harmonies and melodic traces seem to arise naturally, weaving through the soundscape until

"I recorded and played all sounds. One of sound is coming from my home town Sapporo, when my grandmother was gone. Some of instrument is bass clarinet, Bb clarinet, tenor sax, handmade instrument, keys. Especially the wind instruments were recorded while I listened to the source sound." Westminster Abbey communion service reimagined by Ayane Sato.

"I was inspired by the beauty in the percussive sound of the bamboo, and how it contrasts with harsher rustling of the wind and rain. I decided to use the recording as the only sound source: everything you hear in the piece is the original recording, manipulated.  "Most of the piece was improvised by running and looping the 5 minute recording of the bamboo forest through my Eurorack modular synthesizer. I tried to focus on making my own storm around the knocks of the bamboo. The other elements in the piece come from running the sample through the filterbanks, granular algorithms, and distortions in Composer's Desktop Project. "I recorded and mixed the piece on a Tascam Model 12, and then mastered with a (sort of crappy) Behringer Tube Composer, a homemade plate reverb, and a Teac 1/4" tape machine."  Kyoto bamboo soundscape reimagined by Josh Yazbeck.

"The Red Sea is a place with such rich history and significance, it felt overwhelming to try and encapsulate it fully. The field recording reflected to me an origin point. I imagined some type of primordial soup. The biodiversity that bubbles up and flourishes in the red sea despite the salinity feels like an overlooked triumph of nature. I wanted to layer the beautiful sounds of life within the red sea with the noise of trade ships, the voice of human history and the fragility of a place that is both crucial to global exchange and a balance of power.  "The title is a nod to the relentless pursuance of something that cannot be controlled or taken, the inherent divinity in nature and the land itself." Red Sea soundscape, Egypt reimagined by Aemi Kato-Cuarezma.

"After being initially drawn to the rhythmic sounds of the sea and the tumbling rocks, I wanted to explore that process of erosion through the slow breakdown and transformation of the original field recording. In my research I learned this type of coastal erosion is called ‘attrition’ - this word is also used in a military context when the strength or effectiveness of a people is slowly reduced through sustained attacks and pressure.  "The response to the original field recording then evolved to become a reflection on the tension between this shared name of a natural process of coastal erosion, and the (in)human-made violence we are bearing witness to today." Waves in Puerto de Valldemossa reimagined by Sian Landau.