Artiste Budhaditya Chattopadhyay during his constant to and fro travels among cities, stumbled upon Bangalore in 2010 and developed a bitter-sweet relationship with its urban condition. This led to his thorough and exploratory field-works at the margin of transfiguring geography of the city. He collected archival tape and reel-to-reel recordings from Sunday flea market of Bangalore and restored the sounds with an intention to trace the auditory memory of the city. As an outcome of this extensive field research, he produced two complementary pre-apocalyptic sound-works: Elegy for Bangalore and A Well Tempered City that projects a dystopian view of Bangalore.
He presented these two ‘sound-art’ pieces, at Maraa Terrace on Saturday. Elegy To Bangalore captured the contemporary clatter of the city with sounds from the concrete jungle like those of construction works, traffic, and people recorded across the city. The work represented a sonic construct that investigated the multi-layered listening processes at the city undergoing a dynamic metamorphosis. A Well Tempered City took a look at urban environment and its interaction with the people inside it. This piece came from the recordings at Jaaga, during his fellowship-residency.