{"podcast":{"title":"Cities and Memory - remixing the world","slug":"cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world-942987","podcast_index_feed_id":942987,"rss_url":"https://audioboom.com/channels/2138625.rss","website_url":"https://audioboom.com/channels/2138625","image_url":"https://audioboom.com/i/39258170.png","author":"Cities and Memory","episode_count":500,"summary":"Cities and Memory remixes the world, one sound at a time - a global collaboration between artists and sound recordists all over the world. The project presents an amazingly-diverse array of field recordings from all over the world, but also reimagined, recomposed versions of those recordings as we go on a mission to remix the world. What you'll hear in the podcast are our latest sounds - either a field recording from somewhere in the world, or a remixed new composition based solely on those sounds. Each podcast description tells you more about what you're hearing, and where it came from. There are more than 8,000 sounds featured on our sound map, spread over more than 140 countries and territories . The sounds cover parts of the world as diverse as the hubbub of San Francisco’s main station, traditional fishing women’s songs at Lake Turkana, the sound of computer data centres in Birmingham, spiritual temple chanting in New Taipei City or the hum of the vaporetto engines in Venice. You can explore the project in full at www.citiesandmemory.com","last_synced_at":"2026-06-12T18:17:51.629693+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world-942987"},"episode":{"title":"Swallows","slug":"swallows","published_at":"2026-05-27T12:46:05+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world-942987/swallows","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world-942987","url":"https://audioboom.com/posts/8908399","audio_url":"https://audioboom.com/posts/8908399.mp3?modified=1779886206&sid=2138625&source=rss","summary":"\"There are so many extraordinary moments in Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary, Shoah but it’s the interviews with the railway workers and the train drivers that helped facilitate the horrors of the holocaust (some of them still working those same lines when the movie was made in the 70’s and 80’s) and those with the farmers and local people who bore witness to the trains that have the most impact. The sheer matter-of-factness of their recounting; the lack of compassion, the smiles and shoulder shrugging. The banality of genocide. \"After I’d watched Shoah, I felt as though something inside of me had been broken. From childhood I had grown up with the idea of this as the worst of human crimes, the word holocaust, alone, meant to pause for breath. Now here was the shock of seeing people involved with and witness to it writing it off as just another thing that happened in the course of a day of work. It was a shock, though, that came accompanied by an uncomfortable realisation that of course that’s how it was: for evil to be committed on such a huge scale it couldn’t have been any other way. \"The ‘Final Solution’ was a railway operation run to a timetable. It was: mechanics, logistics, coke and steam. Wagoning, shunting, shovelling and coaling. Rubber stamps and forms in triplicate. Cold, logical, every day planning. \"I used locomotive sounds and looped them. \"There’s a legend that there are no birds at Auschwitz but I imagined gazing up high and longing to escape. I have also read about how the inmates began to see the contrails of the American bombers late in the war. I can’t imagine what that must have meant to them. I can’t imagine how much hope they still held onto after everything that they had experienced. \"I imagined a folk song, sang it and then reprised its…","meta_description":"\"There are so many extraordinary moments in Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary, Shoah but it’s the interviews with the railway workers and the train…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":579,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world-942987/episodes/swallows/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/cities-and-memory-remixing-the-world-942987/swallows.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}