Solympics.

In a few days, plucky athletes from around the globe will descend on Paris for the 2024 Olympic Games.

To celebrate this, I wanted to produce a new track that brought the sounds of a city into the music. Worlds and people coming together from a sample. I found that sound via the wonderful brainchild of Stuart Fowkes of Cities and Memory.

The Cities and Memory site is a huge global sound project - collaborating with musicians and sound creatives across the world with the aim of remixing the world. Field recordings are made, submitted and tagged on a map of 125 countries, and then reworked into new compositions.

‘Solympics’ is just one such composition.

I took a field recording of a traditional Chinese instrument being played in a public park in Boston - a haunting sound with added leaf blower background noise and started a new track from it.

The original description from Cities and Memory: A busker plays an amplified Chinese traditional stringed instrument in the Boston public park for passers-by, competing with the industrial drones of leaf-blowing machinery, but cutting through very clearly as we pass closer and closer by him.

You can hear the sample, lightly tweaked at the start of the piece. I then took the main ‘siren’ type sound, cutting it up and repeating it, making it the bedrock of the track.

Following on from this, I imported the sample into the Tapes:O1 plugin - stretching it and pulling it about in all manners of ways to turn it into a playable, very ‘analog’ sample - which forms some of the melodies that you hear here.

Rhythmic duties this time came via some loop programming in Slate + Ash Cycles, plus the ever-handy Logic Drummer with its dayglo techno hat on. Guitars were a late edition with a simple figure to add some drama, and an undercurrent arpeggio stuffed through some Auturia EFX Fragments for glitch fun and games.

Visually, I knew I wanted something which suggested the Olympics without being glossy and corporate. Something a bit gritty, real and non-shiny, and once again Artlist came to my rescue with some wonderful footage of empty arena gym practice. Will they all win a medal?

Hope you enjoy ‘Solympics’. It was great fun taking something from another place and turning it into something new, and hope to do a few more reworks using Cities and Memories soon.

Come to think of it - perhaps we need to put more amazing sound into cities to start with? That’s an idea…