{"product_id":"why-is-it-they-say-a-city-like-any-city","title":"Why Is It They Say A City Like Any City?","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe new album by the Peruvian-born \/ Berlin-based experimental artist Ale Hop was\nconceived in a context of immobility and provides six sonic vignettes that wonder about\nlocation, circularity, rootedness and experience. In collaboration with Ana Quiroga,\nConcepcion Huerta, Daniela Huerta, Elsa M'balla, Felicity Magan, Fil Uno, Ignacio Briceño,\nKMRU, Manongo Mujica, Moises Horta, Nicole L'huillier, Raul Jardín, Sukitoa Onamau,\nTomas Tello.\n\nFollowing her explorations on music's inherent fixation to geographic space and time, be it through\nthe longing of home (\"Apophenia\" 2019) or scientific magnification of invisible worlds (\"The Life of\nInsects\" 2020), Berlin-based Peruvian-born experimental composer Ale Hop's fourth album, \"Why\nIs It They Say a City Like Any City?\", was conceived in a context of immobility. During the lockdown\nmonths, she started a process of remote collaboration, by sending messages, posted from various\ncities along a South American trip, to thirteen musicians from around the world. She journaled her\nimpressions upon these places to an intimate fictional character while reflecting on matters of time,\nsound, space, cosmology and colonial memory. The thirteen musicians dialogued with this voice by\ntaking upon the challenge of responding to the messages with sound collaborations.\nField recordings, mouth drumming, drone cellos, electronic loops, arrhythmic rhythms and voices\ncame back from this experiment. Ale assembled them, by layering, twisting and turning, into sonic\nvignettes that wonder about location, circularity, rootedness and experience, making it the first time\nshe's set her guitar aside. Expect no answers to the album's title question, but an innermost\npsychedelic rumination.\n\"Despite the technological resources that appear to dilute distances, the simulation of closeness\nmirrored on the digital space is an emptied body, a state of precarity, a flat surface; unable to\nwithhold an experience of exchange,\" Ale states. \"So, I began this project by asking myself, how\ncan we escape from the reduced experience of the virtual? The idea behind this experiment was\nthat my messages and the places they describe could drive the composition, be a catalyzer, a\nscore. Thus, to use geography as a tool to remember and imagine, to allow new soundscapes to\nemerge.\"\n\"Memory, diffuse and divergent, sometimes reaches out to the future in its search for form, taking\nshape from the reflections and echoes that come back … like throwing a rock in a pond and having\na rock thrown back at you.\"\nTracklist:\n# The Mountain That Eats Men (collab. with Raul Jardín \u0026amp; Sukitoa o Namau)\n# Mayu Islapi (collab. with Ana Quiroga, Fil Uno \u0026amp; Ignacio Briceño)\n# Latitud 0  (collab. with Daniela Huerta \u0026amp; Manongo Mujica)\n# They Thought of Themselves (collab. with Felicity Mangan \u0026amp; KMRU)\n# Chiapas \u0026amp; Phinaya (collab. with Concepción Huerta \u0026amp; Tomas Tello)\n# Once Upon a Time (collab. with Elsa M'Balla \u0026amp; Nicole L'Huillier)\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Karlrecords","offers":[{"title":"LP.","offer_id":50394724401483,"sku":"2055996","price":22.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0867\/1120\/6219\/files\/test_d9baec2c_thumbnail_4096.jpg?v=1726446863","url":"https:\/\/shop.roughtrade.com\/de\/products\/why-is-it-they-say-a-city-like-any-city","provider":"Rough Trade","version":"1.0","type":"link"}