4.19.2017

el tren fantasma

seen at BoingBoing/2011:

Chris Watson was a founder of the 1970s experimental music/performance art group Cabaret Voltaire who has become an ambient sound recordist for television, film, and radio. More than a decade ago, Watson spent a month on a train traveling across Mexico with a BBC TV crew documenting the Ferrocarriles Nacionales de México's last continuous passenger service across the country from the Pacific to Atlantic coast. Watson has since gone back and cut his ambient audio archive of the trip into an acoustic journey, "evoking memories of a recent past, capturing the atmosphere, rhythms and sounds of human life, wildlife and the journey itself along the tracks of one of Mexico’s greatest engineering projects." The recording, titled "El Tren Fantasma," was broadcast on Radio BBC 4 last year.
Here, in full, the result:

El Tren Fantasma by Chris Watson