MATILDE MEIRELES

Cities, is the third release by multi.modal, it includes two collaboratively developed works. In The kind of problem a city is composer Aaron Einbond worked together with ensemble Yarn/Wire, and in London Scenes he teamed up with myself.

London Scenes is a journey of discovery through field recordings, using Virginia Woolf’s 1931-32 essays series The London Scene as a guide. Woolf’s texts inform the sonic narrative, while the field recordings become a tool to start a conversation, collectively navigate the city, and critically engage with place. Today’s London scenes would be both familiar and foreign to Woolf: from the polyglot crowds of Oxford Circus, John Lewis lobby, Keats House, and Greenwich Pier to an Ashura Day celebration at Marble Arch. The work redefines compositional collaboration through an iterative process in which Einbond’s field recordings are revisited through Meireles’s sound design and synthesised sound. Both are joined by an international cast of speakers who animate Woolf’s texts with diverse accents and experiences as rich as London itself.