Prettiest Train (Haris Sahacic version)

Part of our Prison Songs project - see www.citiesandmemory.com/prisonsongs for full details.

Reimagined by Haris Sahacic.

"It is a collective spirit that makes this sound event truth. I decided to distinguish all the sound sources and to „clean“ them out without changing the length of the recording or touching any bit of the tempo and the perfect rhythm. I believe that any change on this recording would just damage the impression of the truth. It is a document. So I just created one small difference between the leading voice and the chorus. In order to headline the rhythm I also isolated the sound of shovels. Of course train is symbol of movement and freedom, in Bosnia we use sometimes the term “train” as a metaphor for a chance or a woman: „either you catch that train boy or you stay alone“. The original recording was made in the field, but what I am missing are all those sounds of the field. That is how I found the space to play decently with the silence between the lines. I imagined the band of field insects that are improvising uninvited on the prison jam session in the field. In order to make the symbolic connection to the train, I organized the contributions of the „band“ sounding like an old train from 1940. I played a little with surround sound so that „band“ is all around. In one appropriate moment, I added the sound of the Mississippi Dove that is characteristic for the area where original recording was made and the bird sounds – when the male is inviting the female – like old train whistling, I found one short recording of this sound in the www and arranged it a little."