Cities & Memory Album
Packaging
Enclosed in the vinyl recording and CD packaging is an album by Cities & Memory that highlights the variety of nature’s sounds, described as a “selection of the best field recordings” from over 55 countries and using over 500 sounds.
The album's aural experience varies. Not only does the music collection include birdsong, blowholes and the rain forest, it also emphasises the relationship between natural and industrial landscapes, specifically the latter’s intrusiveness and threat–this expressed through abstract reinterpretations of man-made sounds: a passing car, a falling tree, sounds of construction.
The packaging’s materials explores this between nature and man-made landscapes. Banana leaf at varying levels of freshness were combined with plastic transparency to convey the organic and actively decaying against the artificial.
The banana leaves were cut into typographical forms inspired by topographical maps–a human interpretation of natural landscapes. Then, in descending order of size, the outcomes show the numbers “3”, “2”, “1” –echoing the album’s reminder of time running out.