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Crlos: “City of Fluxes” (2003)

From City of the Future, a project of microsound.org

Andrei Tarkovsky’s legendary 1972 sci-fi psychodrama Solaris features a remarkable sequence about 30 minutes into the film, in which the character Burton speeds in an automobile through a vast, labyrinthine metropolis.  (The scene was filmed— where else?— in Tokyo.)  In an already strange film, this passage— entitled “City of the Future” in the DVD chapter headings— is a staggering and experimental gesture: nearly five minutes of montage evoking the dense, alien beauty of the modern urban experience.  The sound mix for this scene is what really makes it work: Tarkovsky’s longtime musical collaborator, Eduard Artemyev, creates a slowly building collage of industrial whirs and rumbles that makes you feel you are traveling not through the city, but into its throbbing concrete heart.

In the spring of 2003, sound artist and curator of microsound.org Kim Cascone invited members of the group’s email list to create remixes of the sound file extracted from the “City of the Future” scene in Solaris.  One of these tracks, “City of Fluxes,” was featured in Past Forward, the audio companion to issue #13 of the fabulous Cabinet magazine, entitled “Futures.”

October 18, 2009, 12:57pm