Piece Comment

Review of Chicago's Memory


An interesting experiment that doesn't come off too well. We're taken on an audio walking tour of locations in Chicago where people died in historic disasters. There's music, traffic sound, and sound effects of screams and moans accompanying the descriptions of grisly deaths by fire, drowning and asphyxiation.

Carolina Wheat can write and has a very good voice, but her narrator's tone is hard to decipher. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to feel compassion for these unfortunate victims of mayhem, or whether her persona was meant to be ghoulish as in a deliberately tacky/campy piece for Halloween. The sound effects seem to support the second impression.

The other overwhelming problem is poor production values. There's lots of distortion and p-pops in the narration, and all of the other sound is just as bad. I wanted to give this experiment a chance, but it's just too hard to listen to.