Cities and Memory
500 episodes listed below
Sound art from places, recordings, and memory.
Cities and Memory - remixing the world turns real places and museum recordings into compact listening pieces. Recent episodes move from quiet streets and Koh Mook to museum sound collections, Andean instruments, Nuristani songs, and a live stage at Le Duc de Lombards.
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Cities and Memory - remixing the world is a listening project in podcast form. It favors the grain of real sound. Recent episodes move between field recordings, ethnographic recordings, live performance, and conversations about how old recordings can become new work. Some entries are minimal, almost like postcards from the edge of an environment. A quiet street carries the presence of morning walkers. Koh Mook appears as a small, still sound-world. Traditional Nuristani songs and Maasai recordings sit beside contemporary performance fragments, leaving the listener to notice texture before narrative. Other episodes are more explanatory. The Century of Sounds panel places museum sound collections at the center, with Philip Grover describing work with photograph, film, and sound, and the selection of ethnographic recordings for artists to reinterpret. The panel keeps returning to responsibility: how field recordings were made, what context was missing, and how research can make later artistic responses more careful. Ilaria's account is especially revealing. She describes following a short 1965 Colombia recording into a diary, asking for access from Italy, consulting a Colombian artist, and revising words that did not feel appropriate. That thread gives the show its strongest editorial shape. Sound is not treated as decoration. It is evidence, memory, material, and sometimes a problem to be handled with tact. The music episodes add another register. At Le Duc de Lombards, stage talk introduces arrangements by Louis Moutin, Géraldine Laurent, Noé Huchard, and François Moutin, capturing the warm disorder of a live room. The Andean music excerpt is more instructional, moving through huayno, yarabí, charango, quena, mandolin, reeds, names, and playing techniques. The show is often rough at the transcript level, and that roughness reflects its source material: multilingual, location-based, sometimes archival, sometimes performed. It is not built for a single host's personality. It is built for ears that enjoy discovering where a recording came from, what it carries, and how artists might listen back to it.
Made for: For listeners drawn to field recording, sound art, ethnographic recordings, experimental music, and the cultural life of place. It especially suits patient ears that enjoy fragments, context, and atmosphere more than polished studio conversation.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by pairing raw or lightly framed recordings with artistic and curatorial context. Recent episodes treat sound as both source material and cultural evidence, from museum collections to Andean instruments and live arrangements.
Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world. The project presents an amazingly-diverse array of field recordings from all over the world, but also reimagined, recomposed versions of those recordings as we go on a mission to remix the world. What you'll hear in the podcast are our latest sounds - either a field recording from somewhere in the world, or a remixed new composition based solely on those sounds. Each podcast description tells you more about what you're hearing, and where it came from. There are more than 8,000 sounds featured on our sound map, spread over more than 140 countries and terri…
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded live panel about remixing archive sound without losing craft or care.
The panel treats archived sound as raw material, not a locked cabinet. It follows a museum-led project that chose 100 ethnographic recordings, pulled in related metadata from other collections, and passed the material to artists for new work.
Art historian Tamar Avishai interviews critics, curators, and writers about single paintings and ideas.
Jennifer Dasal narrates art history's overlooked lives, from Picasso's police file to Rauschenberg and Twombly's romance.
Russell Tovey and Robert Diament interview artists about their materials, biography, and process.
Cinematographer Roger Deakins and James Deakins interview film crew about the craft behind specific shots.
Robert Bound interviews artists and reviews new film, book, and music releases with critics.
This episode features a remixed arrangement of a jazz standard by Géraldine Laurent, blending field recordings with music.
François Moutin hosts a live introduction at Le Duc de Lombards jazz venue, crediting each of the four band members who arranged the opening songs.
A live conversation panel at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (27 February 2026) features three artists—Ilaria Boffa, Salma Ahmed Kala, and Neil Spencer Bruce—discussing their remixes of colonial-era ethnographic field recordings as part of the Cities and Memory 'A Century of Sounds' project.
A panel discussion with musicians exploring their creative processes and responses to specific recordings, starting with Laura Dinfler's experimental approach to a Cadete dance song from Papua New Guinea.
This episode features repetitive and nonsensical speech with no clear topic or structure.