In the Asclepieion

Cities and Memory - remixing the world

"When I heard the field recording I knew I wanted to work with the combination of harp and surrounding ambience. But I kept thinking about the scene-the Villa Borghese gardens, on the site of the ancient gardens of Lucullus, in terms of its temporal layers: the gardens, the recreated temple of Asklepios, and harp as a complicated symbol that usually gestures toward some version of a musical past.
"That sent me down a rabbit hole that involved researching and building replicas of an ancient Roman style cithara and an ancient Greek chelis-style lyre, which are the two main plucked instruments you can hear in the track. The cithara has a clean, guitar-like sound, while the lyre has slacker strings that buzz against the bridge. The majority of the pad-like sounds are also samples of those instruments, along with harps, electric guitar, and a low helicopter drone."
Roman boating lake reimagined by John Savarese.