Top 5 Iconic Albums Turning Place Into Sound

On Saturday, we're teaming up with the iconic London institution Barbican to delve into the nuances of sound - how our perception of it influences our understanding of our everyday. When it comes to travel, sound is an integral part of understanding place - the soundscapes of the grind, the noise of the bustle, and the music that tells the stories of our destinations.

There are countless albums born directly from place: stories of lived experience, rhythms passed down through generations, or cries of discontent or joy soundtracking pivotal moments in a location's history. We've picked five records who channel the sound of a place in multifaceted ways, from storied lyrics to textured soundscapes.

1

Kendrick Lamar – good kid, m.A.A.d city (Compton, LA), 2012

Kendrick's 2012 sophomore effort is a gruelling journey into the hardships of growing up in 1990s Compton, confronting the misconceptions wrought by the glamorisation of thug life in the advent of gangster rap's mainstream success. "I live inside the belly of the rough, Compton, U.S.A. made me an angel on angel dust”, he raps, underscoring the virtual impossibility coming out unscathed from the city's perpetual violence. Caught in the throes of gang warfare, police violence, family commitment, love and loyalty, the album channels the intensity of Compton like startling shades of blood red.

2

Massive Attack – Mezzanine (Bristol), 1998

Bristol in the 1990s was a hotbed of a downtempo scene hinged on synthesised beats, haunting synths, and melting bass lines that form the sonic equivalent of hot wax dripping onto a surface. Bristol was the birthplace of this style (unsurprisingly dubbed "Bristol Sound") a product of the city's distinctive influences, from the anarchy of post-punk to the breakbeats of Caribbean sound systems. Textured, pensive, with spine tingling build ups, laced with clashes of guitar and disparate beats, Massive Attack's 'Mezzanine' is emblematic of this the city's signature sound.

3

Burial – Untrue (London), 2006

Few albums ever achieve cult status, yet this melancholic low-fi effort by Burial achieves just that. Mystifying both listeners and producers with his madcap use of digital sampling - warping sonic cues from game sound effects and YouTube song covers - Untrue is essential a story about London, the endless wandering and night bus chats. Made a year after the London bombings, the album has a liminal sense of eeriness and darkness, the soundtrack to a city disturbed, flawed and heartbroken. In an interview with The Wire, Burial revealed "London’s part of me, I'm proud of it, but it can be dark, sometimes recently I don't even recognise it."

4

Ryuichi Sakamoto – async (Tokyo)

Released in 2017, async is Ryuichi Sakamoto’s sixteenth solo album is an ambient and introspective work that revisits the nuanced moods that have defined his four-decade career - from the Grammy-winning score of The Last Emperor (1989) to the synth-soaked melodies of his 1970s J-pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. It's hard to pinpoint this album to a single place - async draws on field recordings and textures from New York, Paris, Kyoto, and Tokyo. Yet, Sakamoto remains one of Tokyo’s most famous musical sons, and it’s hard not to hear the album’s soft keys, reflective tone, and subtle precision as somehow reflective of the Japanese capital. Given the magnitude of his legacy, the broader question is whether Tokyo has shaped his music, or if the sounds we now associate with Tokyo have been shaped by him.

5

Björk – Homogenic (Iceland), 1997

Is it possible to mention Iceland without talking about Björk? The singer has ridiculed outsiders' obsession with connecting left-field Icelandic music with its staggering scenery, filming absurd scenes like a tea party in a crater in the 1988 song 'Birthday', when she was part of the Sugarcubes. Despite this, Homogenic, is actually about Iceland: "It's Björk goes home", she told press at the time. With throbbing, tense tracks like 'Hunter', she channels the unrestrained, the carnal, making it tempting for us to connect the track to the remote wilds of Icelandic nature. Yet of course, Homogenic is more than a surface-level connection deduced by music journalists. It's conceptual, conflicting, emotive and spiritual. It's intimately Iceland in a way that Björk knows it, not that we do.