Metro Suite No. 3, Op. 7 by ummsbiaus

[In the latter half of this review, I mention physically being somewhere. That’s because that section of the video was filmed at the City Hall SEPTA station in Philadelphia.]

If you’ve ever visited a post-Warsaw-Pact city and ridden its subway system, you understand just how haunted these places feel. The tunnels, wayfinding signs, and sometimes even trains were designed to fit the needs and aesthetics of a country that vanished overnight, and, while the city at ground level may have westernized, the tunnels remain as a buried time capsule. Metro Suite No. 3, Op. 7 by Ummsbiaus assembles a collage of sounds from the Kyiv Metro, capturing the tension of a city under siege from within a bomb shelter, a shelter which, ironically, was constructed by the predecessor state to the country which is currently bombing the city above. And though our situation in the United States may be significantly different, it’s worth considering this conception of our own subways as the haunted relic of a dead state. I’m standing in an underground downtown train station at the intersection of two distinct, grade-separated metro lines, and no station that meets those criteria has been built anywhere in the US in the past forty years. The government is dead, and these are the catacombs.