Piombino

May 22, 2020, 01:05 PM

Piombino lockdown sound reimagined by Anthony Lyons. 

"I was drawn to the sound of the ringing bells of Piombino as markers of time, memory and experience during the lockdown period. The bells ringing every 30 minutes, punctuated by silence and seagulls seemed to capture a surreal sense of time passing – time seeming to slow down and become stationary, repeat, reverse. I was also fascinated by the different kinds of timbrel qualities and rhythmic patterns in the recording – regularity and randomness co-existing, subtle echo patterns created as bells reverberated across the town; The hearing of old sounds in new ways that comes from capturing this strange period of lockdown stillness. 

"In my piece I’ve tried to pick up on some of these characteristics. Bells are re-pitched, reversed, rhythmically stuttered, transformed into pads, reverberated in ways that magnify a sense of time, space and memory. A constant polyrhythmic bell pattern underlies the piece whist other processed granular bell and seagull sounds more irregularly echo, wash and distort across the texture, pushing and pulling the sensations of time, timbre, space."

Part of the #StayHomeSounds project, documenting and reimagining the sounds of the global coronavirus lockdown around the world - for more information, see http://www.citiesandmemory.com/covid19-sounds