Cities and Memory is one of the world’s biggest sound projects, a global, collaborative sound art and field recording programme with the aim of remixing the world, one sound at a time. It covers more than 100 countries and territories with 5,000+ sounds and more than 1,000 contributing artists.
Thousands of field recordings, recomposed and reimagined by artists around the world.
Sounds of the Year 2024 is the eighth annual Sounds of the Year compilation, which collects together some of the highlights of the hundreds of compositions submitted to Cities and Memory over the course of 2024.
These reimagined compositions cover everything from a night in an Indonesian cemetery and dawn breaking over a Bosnian village to prayers in London’s Westminster Abbey and Mongolian reindeer bells. The artistic approaches used to recompose the recordings are no less diverse, with heartfelt torch songs, spoken word, orchestral epics and bubbling ambient electronics.
Together with Francesco Ganassin I worked on a field recording of a taxi ride in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.
Deciding how to re-compose this soundscape, meant to us choosing which flow we would give a sound to. Should we sit in the car or definetely step outside of it?
We finally stayed on the reflective side of the journey, enriching a flux of thoughts, developing the suggestions of a singing voice with clarinets, recorders, percussions, synth basses and a divergent pulsating granulator.
I am very happy that Taxi Dreams is among the 15 tracks selected for the compilation!