WHEN:
Thru May 11, 2025
WHERE:
Pioneer Works
159 Pioneer Street
Brooklyn, NY 11231
TICKETS:
For more information and tickets visit the Pioneer Works website.
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...Sound of the City is an immersive audio installation by artist and composer Hprizm. Rooted in the creative subcultures of the Lower East Side, Hprizm’s practice spans a wide array of genres, including music, performance and multimedia installations. He is a co-founder of the seminal hip hop group Antipop Consortium, an experimental collective known for their lyrical approach to electronic music.
Centered on a sonic score that moves between abstract noise and melodic interludes, Sound of the City collapses vinyl records, tape loops and granular synthesis with audio footage captured by Hprizm over the past few years. Wielding his phone as a primary recording device, the artist took notice of his sonic environment while traversing New York City and western Pennsylvania, where he partially resides. In his own words, “The sound of the city, in a literal sense, is dense. Buried histories rumble beneath the foundation of brick. Crate digging and knowledge of self unearthed a cultural medium that informs my process.”
For Hprizm, sound carries strong implications—not only about personal narrative, but about socioeconomic conditions and resources as well. He writes, “Within the throughline for most of my work is an interrelation between memory and sonic imprints. Over the course of the last few years, with global events in mind, I noticed how much the sonic landscape changed. During the pandemic, the streets were quiet. Then there was the sound of unrest and protest. Things went silent again, and then there was a slow crescendo back to normalcy.”
Sound of the City is a meditation on migration and gentrification while also historicizing moments in time that exist auditorily. Among the noises heard within the work are soul records that the artist and his father once listened to during long road trips, heavily gated drums echoing off New York City Housing Authority tiles and the mechanical grinds of Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania steel factories, to name only a few..."
