This album presents the sounds of a city as you’ve never heard them before.
I spent four days in the city of Hamburg simply listening to its sounds, gathering and collecting them. I distributed these sounds around the world to 32 artists and musicians spanning ten countries.
Each of them has chosen a sound (or sounds) from the collection, taken inspiration from it and produced a reimagined version of that part of the city using the original field recording.
On 3 November 2014, we presented 41 sounds in 24 hours to map and reimagine the sounds of Hamburg over the period of a day. Today, you can hear all 41 sounds and explore the sound map in full at www.citiesandmemory.com.
On this album, we present 24 sounds representing 24 hours, but we take you on a geographical journey across the city from west to east, beginning at Willkomm Hoeft and ending in Ohlsdorf.
The sounds of a city have never been presented like this before – both as a true-to-life documentary of a day in its life, but also as a complete artistic reinterpretation of one city, as heard by people from as far afield as Cape Town, San Francisco and Barcelona.
On the surface, this is Hamburg, Germany – but beneath that, this is about the intersection between places as we experience them at the time and places as we remember them later.
– Stuart Fowkes, Cities and Memory, December 2014.
credits
released December 18, 2014