In late March, I was staying in Dardania near the promenade, which I visited at around 9 pm to record. I first walked on the promenade all the way to the end – to the statue of Bill Clinton – without recording. Afterwards I walked back through the underpass, underneath the modernist (Metabolist) promenade and apartment complex, recording along the way.
The sound of cars and mechanical rumbling, swarming on both sides, emerges close and immediate as main tracks. However, the length of the space here is obfuscated by the room noise. The cars flow like water. The sound of the mechanical apparatus takes over. It is not just the sound of the cars rushing. The infrastructure that this underpass supports becomes physically intimate. We are in the belly of some engineered beast.
Periodically, the sonic space becomes entangled, flowing up and out of the stairways and ventilation holes that connect the listener to the surface. Rather than opening into echoing sound, these portholes open onto silence, reaching into the soft domestic night and sky.