Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces
Five pieces that listen closely to places, from a seaside town and a Kansas City park to the streets of Clermont-Ferrand and the call to prayer in Istanbul.
About the Phantomnesis: Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces
Phantomnesis is a call for works that engage with forgotten or near-forgotten, bringing together the ideas of a phantom and a memory: something absent that continues to make its presence felt. Within this project, the term describes sounds that return as traces, fragments, or altered recollections. What survives may be recognisable, distorted, or detached from its original context.
Sites, Streets & Sacred Spaces gathers five works built from field recordings of real locations. Those locations include a journey from Hastings to London, a street demonstration in France, parks in Kansas City, a lakeside, and the mosques of Istanbul. Each composer treats a place as a living archive. Some transform their recordings only lightly, and others process them heavily, but none treats the place as a backdrop.
The sequence begins with an ordinary day's journey and moves outward through public protest, personal memory and an endangered landscape. It ends with the call to prayer carried across water in Istanbul. Along the way, the music shifts from recognizable street sound toward abstraction and imagination, and then toward ritual.
Pieces and Voices
Shan Lyu is a London-based Chinese artist, writer and music producer. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the intersections of sound, space and information systems. She combines creative writing, sonic composition and interactive installation to investigate how spatial structures shape perception and how information circulates within social and cultural contexts. She holds a Master's degree in Fine Art from the University of the Arts London. Her work has been shown in group exhibitions in Shanghai, Beijing and London, and her writing and sound-based works have appeared in journals including Limit Experience (New York) and Indelible, published by the London Arts-Based Research Centre. Her music is based on field recording, radio and electro-acoustic instruments, and her creative process involves collecting sound from urban and natural living spaces.
Prayers from the Sea by Shan Lyu
Prayers from the Sea draws on the sound of the call to prayer from the mosques of Istanbul. In the recording the call is very vague and distant, accompanied by street sounds and people's chatter, yet it is still breathtaking. Lyu finds it even more fascinating that the exact timings of the call vary daily, based on astronomical calculations. She is not religious, but she is deeply drawn to the epic-like spectacle that the chant can create through such a simple soundscape.
The composition is based on her own recording of the street sounds and the call to prayer from the mosques. It is a re-imagination of how this chant works its power to connect all beings, locations, landscapes and senses within a wider field. To echo this, and to reflect on Istanbul's geographic position connecting two continents and two seas, she has merged elements of the mosque soundscape, Turkish saz, drone and ship horns. She describes the result as "the music that is born from the location and departs from the location."
Pete Stollery studied composition with Jonty Harrison at the University of Birmingham and was one of the first members of BEAST in the early 1980s. After several years as a school teacher in Kent, he moved to Aberdeen to work in teacher education at the former Northern College, which later merged with the University of Aberdeen. From 2000 he was part of the team that re-introduced music programmes at the University, including doctoral programmes in composition and the development of the electroacoustic music studios. He was Head of the Department of Music for many years and retired in 2022 as Professor of Composition and Electroacoustic Music.
Clermont Horns by Pete Stollery
In 1996, with Alistair MacDonald, Robert Dow and Simon Atkinson, he established invisiblEARts, a group that performs acousmatic music throughout Scotland and promotes Scottish acousmatic music to wider audiences at home and abroad. In 2004 he helped set up sound, a new music incubator in northeast Scotland that runs an annual festival of new music. He is also artistic director of Any Enemy, northeast Scotland's new music ensemble. His main interest is in how humans respond to sounds in their immediate surroundings, particularly sounds not necessarily intended for listening, and in how engagement with sound relates to the idea of place. His music is published by the Canadian label empreintes DIGITALes.
In France, there is a cultural tradition of taking to the streets to demonstrate, particularly when the government makes a decision that does not sit well with one or more sectors of the population. The tradition has endured since the revolution and persists to this day. Perhaps the best-known of the recent demonstrations are those organized by the Gilets Jaunes movement. Angry at projected increases in road fuel prices in 2018, its members donned the yellow gilet jaune, the yellow hi-vis jacket that all French drivers must carry by law, and took to the streets in their cars.
On 17 November 2018, Stollery was in Clermont-Ferrand gathering data for a project with photographer John Perivolaris and writer Ed Welch. He heard the sound of car horns in the distance and immediately reached for his recording device, entranced by the harmonies of the constantly smearing horn sounds. At that point, they did not know that this was the first of the many Gilets Jaunes demonstrations.
The piece forms part of Aides… Mémoires…, an album release with Jonty Harrison. The album consists of short forms (3 to 6 minutes) made from single field recordings from around the world. Clermont Horns was composed in Studio Alpha at VICC (Visby International Composers Centre) in Sweden in 2020.
Born in Kos, Greece, in 1983 and known as Ninos or ninosgr, Kimon Emmanouil Grigoriadis is a composer and sound designer of acousmatic and instrumental music. He came to the piano and guitar at the age of five and graduated from Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge in 2005. He continued his studies in Greece before settling in Wales. At Bangor University he completed an MMus with distinction in 2010. In 2016 he completed a doctorate in electroacoustic composition and sonic art, supervised by Prof. Andrew Lewis and held on Bangor's 125th Anniversary Scholarship in Digital Sonic Art. Bangor awarded him its Parry Williams Prize in 2010, and he taught music technology there as a graduate teaching assistant until 2013.
His music moves between loudspeakers and players. Acousmatic works such as Peri-Phonis (2011) and 7Doors (2014) have travelled from Electroacoustic Wales, INTER/actions and the Bangor New Music Festival to Leicester, Oxford and Kos. Commissions have come from Ensemble Cymru (Ice) and the Pontio Foundation (Digital Tea Dance). In October 2024, 7Doors returned to Pontio Arts Centre for the thirtieth anniversary of Electroacoustic Wales. Since completing his doctorate, he has given as much attention to creating music software and working with artificial intelligence.
7Doors by ninosgr
7Doors engages with the near-forgotten practice of attentive listening to everyday sonic environments. These are sounds that once formed the intimate texture of daily life but are now habitually filtered out by perceptual habit and urban overstimulation. The stereo acousmatic composition draws on personal field recordings made during an ordinary day's journey from Hastings to London. It captures mundane sounds we have learned to ignore: road traffic, train station ambience, church rituals, domestic water drops, children's voices, and fleeting expressions of affection across languages. Rather than transforming these materials heavily, the piece uses minimal processing to reframe them and lets their inherent musicality emerge.
The structure of successive "doors" suggests thresholds of awareness, each opening onto a familiar yet newly perceptible sonic world. What has been forgotten is not the sounds themselves, since they surround us constantly. It is our capacity to truly hear them and to recognize how these quiet auditory layers shape our psychological, emotional and cultural experience. By presenting the recordings within the focused context of acousmatic listening, the work retrieves a way of engaging with our environment that predates our current state of sonic desensitization. The piece invites listeners to rediscover the fragile, resonant beauty hidden within the ordinary soundscape of daily existence. It suggests that what we have lost is not silence, but the ability to be present to the sounds that accompany us.
Susan Brewster is a UK-based composer and songwriter from the USA. Her compositions reflect on a spectrum of musical styles, traditions, and concepts. Her electroacoustic work has been awarded and premiered at international festivals. Invited as a guest composer to the London Gamelan Composers Forum, she presented Ears to Earth, for gamelan and electronics, which premiered at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. Her compositions are abstract, suggesting stories or conundrums, and her scores range from conventional notation to graphic designs that prompt improvisation. Her current focus is on creating ambisonic, or immersive, environments that explore the human relationship to technology.
Recent discoveries of fossilised human footprints prompted this piece, along with the idea of aeonic imprints. These are things that seem lost or forgotten but last indefinitely, from fossils to DNA. The idea offered many images during composition. Whether it is a footprint in the sand or an unconscious memory, an event may suddenly or gradually reveal what has been hidden for a long time. These ideas are reimagined in a composition for reimagined instruments, which draws on familiar patterns and motifs.
As an ambisonic work, the piece aims to place the listener inside an immersive environment of sound textures. They unfold and develop through spatial positioning and interaction. Combinations and patterns oppose or align in different places within a three-dimensional space. This creates dynamics and an evolution, and the result is an abstract experience of sound along overlooked aesthetic pathways.
The Nature of Persistence and the Other Way Round by Susan Brewster
Georgia Kalodiki was born in Athens in 1975. She studied classical guitar, advanced theory, and composition there. She holds a master's degree and a PhD in composition from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a second PhD in electroacoustic composition from the Ionian University of Corfu. She is a professor of music and a freelance composer.
Nature Instrumentale is a mix of contrasting sounds trying to fit together. Through acousmatic composition, it builds an acoustic bridge between instruments and the wasteland of the Troizina region of Greece. Sounds of nature, such as wind, animals, and phonemes of the human voice, are mixed with experimental material from flute, violin, cello, classical guitar, recorder, and piano. These sounds are constantly transformed into new forms of expression in a mimetic process of distorting patterns.
Nature Instrumentale by Georgia Kalodiki
Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls grew out of an international call from Cambiata Arts for contemporary music, experimental composition, and heritage-rooted works. The call sought pieces that explore the forgotten, the near-forgotten, and the reimagined. It welcomed works that bring neglected musical systems, regional practices, extinct gestures, or overlooked aesthetic pathways into today's listening.
Each submission was reviewed by an international jury of six professional composers, performers, and researchers. Their own careers embody the premise of the call, and each has spent years bringing overlooked musical systems, regional practices, and reimagined traditions into contemporary listening. The jurors work in Toronto, Hannover, Skopje, Bangkok, and Tehran, and across Vienna, Graz, and Klagenfurt in Austria. Their practices range from electroacoustic composition and open-source technology to somatic voice and live electronics, traditional Thai instruments, artistic research, and jazz scholarship. They considered each work for its engagement with forgotten or near-forgotten material, its compositional richness, and its artistic conviction. The five works here emerged from that process, and their composers are also invited to join the Cambiata Arts roster.
About the Phantomnesis Call
Phantomnesis: Residues and Recalls
The first Phantomnesis compilation · Five works
Release date: October 30, 2026
Curated and published by: CambiataArt Records
Rights: Each artist retains full ownership and rights to their work.
Release Details