Cities And Memory

This recording was originally broadcast in 1963, in the first year of Taiwan’s first terrestrial TV station, the Taiwan Broadcasting Company. "Look me in the eye" takes a short sequence of a mountain folk song sung by a women’s chorus, from the original 30-minute recording. I layered sound in GarageBand, selecting and editing archival material, contemporary field recordings, overheard dialogue and digital loops, to build aural glimpses of cultural, temporal, and geographic landscapes. By positioning the mountain folk song in dialogue with a recording of a metro train in a Tokyo tunnel, I form a sonic relationship between the mountain above, the underground below, and the distant flatland of my Newhaven studio from which the piece is composed.The folk song functions as both voice and landscape, carrying the acoustic imprint of elevation and openness (shaped by geography rather than infrastructure), of a community embedded in place, where sound travels across valley and mountain, retaining its sense of distanc