This composition is built from a sound walk from 8th and 37th in Manhattan, New York, late at night. That night, when making the recording, it almost felt as if the city was so powerful and all-present that it could consume you entirely unless you resisted it. 

It brought to mind a poem I’d written as part of a collection called Chartless/demagnetised, released in 2021, called “City”, which is also about the overwhelming nature of what it feels like to purely experience a city in every fibre of your being. 

The field recording sits underneath a bed of ambient soundscapes, rising and falling with the rhythm of the city and of the piece so that your awareness of it changes throughout the piece. The composition features fourteen voices reading out lines from the poem, which forms the centre of the piece. 

New York soundwalk reimagined by Cities and Memory. 

Poem text: 

Tonight the city hangs suspended,

waiting vampiric to add my story

to the countless thousands

already drummed

drummed

drummed   

into its concrete steps

blood gorged on by its handrails,

drained hungrily by pavements like the first rain of a new season.

The street lights are perfect puncture wounds

through which, Saturno devorando above,

peeling back the skin, 

it can trace my footsteps;

trapped in illustrious alleyways 

gilded by the achievements of generations.

I need somewhere practical, like the sea

(unfussily inhaling and exhaling trade routes)

that leaves me space to write my own ending.

Poem readers:

Ella Kay

Emmy Tither

Kitty Turner

Steffi Neuhuber

Cristina Marras

Ronan McQuillan

Marcelo Caneiro de Lima

Euan McAleece

Joel Graham

Jon Ogara

Simon Woods

Andy Lyon

Robert Sookhan

Bruce Davenport