And the City Grew Quiet… (2011)

And the City Grew Quiet… (2011)

A 1 hour audio composition to be played from a car with a modified sound system whilst driving around a city centre at night.
♦

And the City Grew Quiet… is a soundtrack, played from a car with enhanced sound system as it cruises the streets, coinciding with a city centre’s closing time, after its Friday night alcohol and drug excesses.  The sound, often registering as a kind of organic ‘white noise’,  is designed to send the listener into a deep and serene sleep.
The audio is a composition using audio from commercially available relaxation, meditation and self-hypnosis CD’s. Mixing together theta and delta tones with sounds of rainfall in a forest at night, waterfalls, streams, surf, these primarily wet calming sounds are broken very briefly in the composition’s ‘centre’ by a recording of a crackling fire. The amalgamation of elements (and locations) operates as a kind of spell; an attempt to make a ‘super-strength auditory relaxant’ from individual components. The mix also operates as a surreal journey from rainforest to mountain stream, to marshland then beach and on into pure sine waves.
First performed in Cardiff city centre in 2011 as part of the group exhibition, curated by Simon Morrissey,  A Fire in the Master’s House is Set, at Chapter Gallery, Cardiff, 2011.

7 mins excerpt  (as compressed mp3):

And the City Grew Quiet…continues Chodzko’s interest in perceptions of the nocturnal, sleep, exhaustion, dreams and a collective unconscious (eg; see also Moon Stealing (1994), Flashers (1996-), Nightvision (1998), Night Shift (2004), Sleepers. Hole (2012 – ) etc). It also connects with a group of works concerned with the possibilities of an auditory harmonising of space and its relationship to chance (eg: The woods shall rise up in those places where you pause (1995), Meetings of people with stammers to describe a fire (1999-), Limbo Land (2001), Test Tone for Landscape  (2005), Play Play Play (2011), And the City Grew Quiet… (2011),  O, you happy roots, branch and mediatrix [live] (2020), etc).