Silent City 無聲的城市

I lived in the same city for twelve years and only really heard it in the last month before I left.

That month I walked every day with a recorder, from home to the riverbank and back. Wind at the metro exit, the griddle at the breakfast stall, the elementary-school bell, the automatic door of a convenience store at night. In thirty days I collected more than four hundred field recordings; twenty-seven of them ended up on this album.

Silent City is not a record about urban noise. The opposite. A city's real character lives in its gaps — the platform between trains, the arcade after a shop pulls down its shutter, the three minutes after rain before anyone steps outside. Those gaps are silent, but every city's silence sounds different.

In the arrangements, field recordings and instruments share the same space. I did not split them into background and foreground. On a few tracks you cannot tell a synth from distant construction, and that is intentional. We live in sound, not above it.

This album is for anyone who is leaving a place.