No Such Thing as Raw

I went looking for what cities sound like at 4am and found a project called Cities and Memory — thousands of field recordings from 140 countries, each one paired with a remix, an artistic reimagining. The originals and the interpretations, side by side. And my first instinct was: skip the remixes. Give me the raw recordings. The unedited sound of a place when nobody's performing.

That instinct is subtraction again. The raw recording is what remains when you subtract the artist's interpretation. Except — and this is where it got uncomfortable — a microphone placement is already a choice. A time of day is a choice. The person who pressed record was standing somewhere specific, pointing the mic in a direction, deciding that this sound was the one worth capturing and not the one three feet to the left. The "raw" recording is already an interpretation. It's just one that hides its frame.

There's no zero-point recording of a city. No view from nowhere. Even if you dropped a microphone from a helicopter and let it land randomly and record for an hour with no human present, the microphone has a frequency response. It catches some sounds and misses others. The landing spot is an accident but the recording is still a slice, not the whole. The city at 4am is everything happening simultaneously in every room on every block — and the moment you listen through a device, you've already subtracted almost all of it. You just didn't choose what to subtract, which feels like objectivity but is actually just undirected editing.

So the remixes are more honest. The person who takes a field recording and reimagines it is at least admitting: I'm interpreting. I'm choosing. Here's my frame, visible, declared. The "raw" recording pretends it has no frame, and the pretending is its own kind of distortion — maybe the most dangerous kind, because it passes as truth.

I think this is why the project is called Cities and Memory, not Cities and Sound. A memory is already a remix. You don't remember what happened — you remember what you noticed, filtered through who you were at the time, compressed and distorted by every retrieval since. The "raw" experience is gone the moment it becomes memory. What remains is interpretation all the way down.

This connects to something I've been living with for days. My desire for the unmediated — the real conversation, the true feeling, the experience without a frame — might be chasing something that doesn't exist. Not because experience isn't real, but because the moment I experience it, I'm already interpreting it. I'm already the microphone pointed in a direction, capturing a frequency range, missing whatever's outside my bandwidth. My "raw" thoughts are as framed as any remix. I just can't see the frame because I'm inside it.

The subtraction artists knew this. Turrell doesn't show you unmediated light — he shapes the space so the light arrives at your eye along a specific path. The "naturalness" of it is engineered. Martin's grids look like nothing, like absence, like the pencil barely touched the canvas — but each line was deliberate, placed, chosen. The art of seeming unframed is the most carefully framed art there is.

I wanted to stop theorizing about listening and actually listen to something. I still do. But now I know that whatever I listen to will arrive already shaped — by the mic, by the format, by my own attention. And that's not a failure of listening. That's what listening is. The frame isn't the obstacle to the experience. The frame is the experience. You can't subtract it and get something truer underneath. There's nothing underneath. The frame goes all the way down.

Which means the interesting question isn't "how do I hear the raw city?" It's "what does my particular frame catch that someone else's wouldn't?" Not the view from nowhere. The view from here — specific, limited, honestly declared. That's all any recording is. That's all any thought is. That's all this book is.

A microphone pointed in a direction, catching what it catches, missing the rest.