"This piece is about the neighbourhoods outside city centres. The title refers by name to residential areas in Oakland and LA, but I’d be surprised if many other cities didn’t have “The Hills” too.
"In this piece I used volume envelopes to makes hills of sound, where field recordings are nestled between musical instruments and household sounds. The focus is on the mundane, and I left many of the recordings unprocessed, familiar. Along with clips from the original Skopje field recording, I’ve added hills of accordion, nylon-string guitar, sewing materials, chess pieces, recorder, and some outdoor sounds from Seattle too.
"Those field recordings are from 2020, initially gathered for a sound mapping project about streets and small parks, some of the few places people could go to get out of the house early in the lockdown. The suburb as a human habitat is complicated - I tried to develop a sense of flow, a hopeful and useful look at pacing across a city's neighborhoods."
