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Cities & Memory - A ballad for the billionaires (Davos, Switzerland)

from Libertà in montagna by Cities and Memory

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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.

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from Libertà in montagna, released March 24, 2022

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Cities and Memory Oxford, UK

Cities and Memory is one of the world’s biggest sound projects, a global, collaborative sound art and field recording programme with the aim of remixing the world, one sound at a time. It covers more than 100 countries and territories with 5,000+ sounds and more than 1,000 contributing artists.
Thousands of field recordings, recomposed and reimagined by artists around the world. ... more

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