Cities And Memory

This piece for the Century of Sound project began with a single field recording drawn from the archive of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford. Rather than this recurring functioning as an objective document of place or event, I approached the recording as a temporal fracture, a sound that had already been severed from the moment that produced it. I was inspired by the thought that a recording is made not to preserve presence, but to register our disappearance and that an archive does not store the past intact, it stores its decaying remains. Thus all recorded sound is hauntological, and exists as an audible ghost or spectral presence of something or someone, the reanimation of the past as a memory becoming a new memory and so on, each time changing its perception. The record I used carried voices and environmental details (mostly of work activities) that no longer exist, yet through the recording can never fully vanish, as sound has folded time back on itself.The entire composition is derived from this single arc