Layers of the City

Layers of the City, 5-minute excerpt, 2019.

How might we sing our way through the transformation of place?

Layers of the City reflects on spaces in Santa Ana, California both inhabited and boarded up, of immigrant owned entities that passed through generations only to be pushed out by rising rents and revitalization plans. The stories of Santa Ana are the stories of Sunset Park in Brooklyn, of Pilsen in Chicago, and of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles — neighborhoods where real estate speculation supersedes communities. With these processes in mind, we wrote a song that follows the composition and form of a cumulative song where the verse structure is modified by a constant progression so that each subsequent verse extends beyond the preceding verse. We see this structure as metaphoric to the transformation of place — with the addition of new entities and inhabitants come modification and reduction. The intention of our song is to speak of the addition and transformation of forms, populations, and architectures.

The song has 12 verses, and each verse requires the projection of a distinct voice in different environments across Santa Ana. As the song progresses, so do the amount of voices singing the chorus. In the end, a larger assembly of bodies and voices come together, perhaps forming a community, a resistant cumulative process.