City Shadows

City Shadows

Electrictown – Expressway – Engines and Pines

Pieced together by recording walks through Akihabara Electric Town, the Metropolitan Expressway which runs through the city (and past her apartment) and Hamarikyu Gardens, Anna Murray brings the fizzing sounds of Tokyo life indoors, melding them with her own delicate treatment of improvised sampling, instrumental layering and live-performed processing. 

The result is a dream-like slow-scan through rushing traffic, temple bells, scurrying cicadas, noh chants, scattered crowds, the sound of radios playing from shop windows, game machines and vignettes of passing conversations. Anna's own interventions to the sound world never feel intrusive, and instead offer a subjective lens to the outside world: placing herself in a similar position to that of experimental filmmaker Chris Marker in his 1986 documentary 'Tokyo Days'. During the making of this work, Tokyo was not put into official covid-19 lockdown, instead a kind of voluntary isolation. Anna meets a city tilted off its axis, conjuring aural material quietly singing with wonder, alienation, sadness and longing.

Design by Oli Barrett