No man's land

Jul 19, 03:43 PM

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"Cimarron County is at the far western tip of the Oklahoma Panhandle, an area formerly known as No Man's Land. The High Plains where the field recording was created have witnessed waves of migration through the centuries: nomadic indigenous tribes following the hunt, travelers and traders on the Old Santa Fe Trail,

"European settlers racing to claim land in the Cherokee Strip Land Run of 1893, defeated farmers fleeing the devastating Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Today, Cimarron has the fewest residents (about 2,100), lowest population density (two people per square mile), and fewest number of stoplights (zero) of any of the 77 counties of Oklahoma.

"The sense of isolation is reflected and expanded through electroacoustic sound manipulation blended with a meditative percussive pulse, evoking the timeless cycle of the movement of people against a never-changing distant horizon." 

Cimarron county dustbowl reimagined by Opus 46.

Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration. 

For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration

IMAGE: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons