Cities and Memory - remixing the world

• Black milk

  "This composition is based on an ambisonic recording made inside the Sauna at Auschwitz. This was the ‘bathhouse’ where new arrivals from the trains arriving at the camp were stripped of all their belongings, valuables and clothes, registered and tattooed with a number, then showered, shaved, disinfected and re-clothed. The building had a “clean” and a “dirty” side, and machines were used to steam and delouse clothing. Existing prisoners were also sometimes sent to the Sauna in attempts to control pests and disease in the camp. "As Andrzej Strzelecki describes in the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum book about the Auschwitz Sauna, the purpose of this place had little to do with caring for prisoners’ hygiene. Instead, it acted as an instrument in the Nazis’ system of mass destruction and theft of the property of groups targeted in pursuit of their racist ideology. The sauna was also a site of ritual humiliation, dehumanisation and control, stripping people of their dignity. Most new arrivals believed they were being sent to labour camps or resettled to start new lives. Those “selected” on the train ramp never made it to the Sauna, however. They were taken directly to the gas chambers. "The history of this place and the suffering of the people who passed through it deeply shaped my response to the field recording. In the composition I aimed to evoke the disorientation, disbelief, fear and oppressive control that must have been felt there and the mechanistic, industrialised systems that enabled such extensive dehumanisation. Given the nature of the subject I focused on the texture, sounds and voices in the recording and added additional sounds and instruments. The title, Black Milk, comes from Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s poem, Todesfuge (Death Fugue)." Auschwitz sauna soundscape reimagined by Laura Hills, from a recording by Anders Vinjar.

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• Sauna, Auschwitz

  Ambisonics recordings of the acoustics inside the "Sauna" in Auschwitz, where the prisoners were disinfected, shaved, stripped of their clothes and their valuables and tattooed with a number. Same acoustics today as in 1942. Recorded by Anders Vinjar.

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• Among the Oldenburg ultras

  At VFB Oldenburg vs. Luebeck, 9 May 2025 (final score: 0-2). An impressively large section of ultras for a small club in Germany's fourth division, marshalled by a leader with a megaphone. This is a passage of Oldenburg fans songs underpinned by drumming to keep everyone energised and in time.  Recorded by Cities and Memory. 

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• The Oldenburg ultras choir

  "I asked for a random field recording to let chance guide my ear. What arrived resonated: unmistakably urban, shaped by the pulse of a collective ritual. In the voices of the Vfb Oldenburg Ultras chants I heard an expression of joy and working-class culture, a liturgy sung by a secular choir. Lower division football provides an inclusive space where local cultural identity and community can be celebrated. The glamour needs to be homegrown on a wet midweek evening, when your team is losing (again). This sense of community is often more inspiring than the display on the pitch. It also helped that they share the blue and white stripes of my own club. "The piece draws solely from the original recording, its sounds stretched and looped across four tapes, long and short fragments circling one another. Overdrive, echo, resonators, and reverb shape the texture, sharpening some edges, dissolving others to emphasise and blend. I let the voices and rhythms guide the process, leaving them ‘visible’ throughout, figures present in the fog. Their call and response summoned memories of Bali’s Kecak — the chant’s spiralling energy, its collective breath — while the martial drumming beneath it all became the spine of the beat. Everything is distorted as it should be." Oldenburg FC vs. Luebeck match reimagined by smithdarg.

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• Duality

  "Duality draws from the resonant tolling of church bells. The work explores how a single sound can hold opposing states—deep yet relaxing, weighty yet weightless. The bells become a meditation on perception itself: their meaning shaped not by acoustic properties alone, but by the listener's inner state. In their reverberations lies a paradox resolved only in stillness." Bremerhaven bell sounds reimagined by Bruce Nemeth.

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