SONIC HERITAGE
Dear Listeners, Happy World Heritage Day! I'm excited to share that a composition of mine is included in Sonic Heritage, Cities & Memory’s largest ever project, which launched today.
The full project is here: https://citiesandmemory.com/heritage
Sonic Heritage is the first collection of the sounds of the world’s most famous sights. The project presents the sounds of 270 UNESCO World Heritage sites and items of intangible heritage from 68 countries—all reimagined by artists from around the world to create a brand new way of experiencing these spaces. You can explore the sounds via a global sound map, or a player through which you can search by artist name, country, type of sound and so on.
Explore the sound map here and find both original field recordings and reimagined compositions.
I chose to work with Colin Hunter’s recordings of monk parakeets in Madrid’s El Retiro park. I was familiar with parrots living in European parks, having previously spent a lot of time in Rome, where pet birds were also released and became regular features of many of the city’s parks. When the call for this project went out, I was doing a month long residency in the south of Spain, and selected a sound from Madrid knowing I’d be there in February. I’ve contributed to Cities & Memory before (“Maria,” remix of a manual coffee grinder for Obsolete Sounds in 2022), but I was intrigued by the possibilities of being able to re-record on the same site that the original field recording was made.
In recent years, I've developed a field recording based practice of reworking and remixing sounds using small portable speakers, using binaural headphones in combination with a stereo pair to record my hybrid performance-installation. I happened to be in Madrid shortly after choosing my sound, and so I reworked the original field recording of monk parakeets in Madrid's Retiro Park in situ, my looped and processed bird calls attracting curious birds who add to the din. This live recording forms the base of my composition, which is further embellished by additional loops, tape processing, and drones.
You can also hear my composition here.
Selected compositions and field recordings are included on these two digital collections available on Cities & Memory’s Bandcamp page.