Proton motive force

"What struck me about this recording was the joyful melancholy of the brass band, a bittersweet, steady march. The constant pulse of life. A warm embrace, a salve for wayward souls. The chug of an old train on a long journey. The rhythms that govern our lives, that bring a sense of constancy, but are also relentless and uncompromising. These universally human rhythms but also all biological rhythm and pre biological rhythm. When life feels difficult I often think about the pulses that stretch back to deep time. The emergence of the major transitions in evolution, the very first clockwork of metabolism in some deep sea vent (can you tell I've been reading about the origins of life lately?), or of genetic replication, multicellular organisms, language, and ultimately culture. 

"I loved the quality of the brass instruments and sampled these heavily. Many of them I sampled with a long release and set to looping to create non synced delay effects to give it a shifting and organic feel but with a strong backbone pulse. In contrast to the original, everything is submerged as if it were in a deep sea vent. I added a few synthetic sounds on top to complement the rougher sampled sounds. For the arrangement, I wanted to contrast sparse and dense moments and try to give most sounds a chance to breathe as well as to go away for a while and come back to establish a theme. I also varied the main pulsing sounds and played with putting each more in the foreground or background."

Religious procession in Lima reimagined by Stanislav Nikolov.

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This sound is part of the Sonic Heritage project, exploring the sounds of the world’s most famous sights.

Find out more and explore the whole project: https://www.citiesandmemory.com/heritage