Cities And Memory

This piece begins with a single recording: a forest soundscape captured by Louis Sarno in what is now the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo, with birds, shifting air, and the distant rumble of a storm. The tape is not just a neutral document. It shows how sound can be taken, stored and studied. It is both a memory of a living environment and a product of the colonial era that collected and classified other people’s worlds.Bernard Stiegler writes about tertiary retention, the way human experience is stored in technical objects such as recordings. These objects extend our ability to remember and listen, but they also change and sometimes remove what they hold. Stiegler calls such technology a pharmakon, something that can be both harmful and helpful. The recording is a trace of a forest displaced, but it is also a way that forest continues to be heard.This composition works with that tension. It does not sample the sounds or remake them as material for a new track. Instead it tries to “stay wi