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Sound of the City is an immersive audio installation and listening environment by NYC born artist and composer Hprizm, whose practice spans a wide array of genres, including music, performance and multimedia installations. He is a co-founder of the seminal hip-hop group Antipop Consortium, an experimental collective known for their lyrical approach to electronic music.

Centered on a sonic score that moves between abstract noise and melodic interludes, Sound of the City collapses vinyl records, tape loops and granular synthesis with audio footage captured by Hprizm over the past few years. Wielding his phone as a primary recording device, the artist took notice of his sonic environment while traversing New York City and western Pennsylvania, where he partially resides. In his own words, “The sound of the city, in a literal sense, is dense. Buried histories rumble beneath the foundation of brick. Crate digging and knowledge of self unearthed a cultural medium that informs my process.”

For Hprizm, sound carries strong implications—not only about personal narrative, but about socioeconomic conditions and resources as well. He writes, “Within the throughline for most of my work is an interrelation between memory and sonic imprints. Over the course of the last few years, with global events in mind, I noticed how much the sonic landscape changed. During the pandemic, the streets were quiet. Then there was the sound of unrest and protest. Things went silent again, and then there was a slow crescendo back to normalcy.”

Sound of the City is a meditation on migration and gentrification while also historicizing moments in time that exist auditorily. Among the noises heard within the work are soul records that the artist and his father once listened to during long road trips, heavily gated drums echoing off New York City Housing Authority tiles and the mechanical grinds of Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania steel factories, to name only a few. These components are then processed and reinterpreted through tape loops and Ableton Live, both of which are widely accessible tools that helped liberate musical production from corporate and academic infrastructures.

This work was originally inspired by the curriculum that Hprzim taught at William Paterson University, which encouraged students to document their environment and, in turn, introduce themselves through sound. The coursework tapped into early electronic music—where tape, voice and environment each factored heavily—and later evolved into PRESSUREWAVE, a multimedia work that was first presented as a work-in-progress by ISSUE Project Room (2013) and then more formally by Penn University (2018) and The Kitchen (2019). Whereas these prior iterations presented a visual component as its centerpiece, Sound of the City isolates and concentrates viewers’ attention on a score. In doing so, the work amplifies our awareness of the ways in which noise shapes memory, identity and perception.

Originally presented at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, the exhibition will be expanded and adapted for Wood Street Galleries at the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, where it will incorporate new audio recordings and sculptural works. Leading up to the exhibition, the artist will visit  locations throughout Pittsburgh to capture the distinctive sonic textures of our riverfronts, steel mills, transit corridors, churches, social halls, and city parks. These recordings will be remixed into the evolving composition, tying this presentation of the work intimately with Pittsburgh's cultural rhythms and lived experiences. To extend the exhibition beyond the gallery walls, QR codes will be placed at select recording locations linking to the final audio work transforming the sites into portals for listening.

About the Artist

Hprizm, the creative moniker for Kyle Austin, is an American avant-garde artist and composer whose work spans performance art, pop music, and multimedia projects. Formally trained as a visual artist, he developed his practice from the axis of poetry, Hip hop and the experimental arts community of the Lower East Side during the early 1990s. Noted for evoking images of “Sun Ra and Afrika Bambaataa at once” (Jesse Sewer XL8R Magazine), Hprizm—also known as High Priest—is a founding member of the critically acclaimed, hip hop collective Antipop Consortium, as well as a cited figure in the Afrofuturist canon. Over the past two decades, he has shared stages with a wide array of artists, including The Roots, Radiohead, MF Doom, DJ Shadow, Matthew Shipp, Vijay Iyer, and Steve Lehman. As a composer, his works have been presented at venues such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, MoMA PS1, the Walker Museum, the New Museum, SXSW and CalArts. As the creative director of PRIZMLABS, his client base includes Kehinde Wiley, Simone Leigh, Moor Mother, Ursula Rucker and Meredith Monk, among many others.

Hprizm: Sound of the City is organized by Pioneer Works and adapted for presentation at Wood Street Galleries by the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. The original presentation was made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, as well as the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New Yorks State Legislature.

Photo credit: Sandra Mar