A ballad for the Davos billionaires
Aug 02, 2020, 02:27 PM
Helicopters above Davos at the World Economic Forum reimagined by Cities and Memory.
It's the world's biggest gathering of leaders, and having experienced what it's like to be there, it really is like a hermetically-sealed bubble of big business and political leaders unlike anything else. The constant arrival of motorcades, private jets and helicopters bringing in the rich and powerful is very striking, and inspired this piece.
We start with Professor Rutger Bregman's viral speech from Davos, at which he attacks the hypocrisy of tax-avoiding billionaires, and take in other notable on-site protests at Davos from Leonardo Di Caprio and Greta Thunberg - Davos is notable for the relative lack of confrontational, oppositional speakers, replaced instead by a lot of back-slapping and chin-stroking pontification.
The opening section represents Davos all year round, a quiet mountain town in the peace of the Alps, in itself a witness to the increasing impacts of climate change - the louder sections are built around the helicopter field recording, representing the WEF taking over the town and the news agenda, and also standing for the noise and bluster that rarely amounts to meaningful positive action in our world.
From a compositional standpoint, we've deliberately given ourselves a limited palette of instruments for this piece, creating it entirely using Spitfire Audio's excellent - and free - Labs instruments.
It's the world's biggest gathering of leaders, and having experienced what it's like to be there, it really is like a hermetically-sealed bubble of big business and political leaders unlike anything else. The constant arrival of motorcades, private jets and helicopters bringing in the rich and powerful is very striking, and inspired this piece.
We start with Professor Rutger Bregman's viral speech from Davos, at which he attacks the hypocrisy of tax-avoiding billionaires, and take in other notable on-site protests at Davos from Leonardo Di Caprio and Greta Thunberg - Davos is notable for the relative lack of confrontational, oppositional speakers, replaced instead by a lot of back-slapping and chin-stroking pontification.
The opening section represents Davos all year round, a quiet mountain town in the peace of the Alps, in itself a witness to the increasing impacts of climate change - the louder sections are built around the helicopter field recording, representing the WEF taking over the town and the news agenda, and also standing for the noise and bluster that rarely amounts to meaningful positive action in our world.
From a compositional standpoint, we've deliberately given ourselves a limited palette of instruments for this piece, creating it entirely using Spitfire Audio's excellent - and free - Labs instruments.