Shanghai-based electronic musician and sound artist B6 recently released a reformatted version of his Sounds of the City video installation exploring the natural occurring sights and sounds collected from Hangzhou and Shanghai. Though Hangzhou is the capital and largest city of the Zhejiang Province in Eastern China, B6 chooses to highlight the territory’s surrounding nature, most likely to show juxtaposition with Shanghai’s urban scenery.The video starts in Hangzhou, tightly focused on vibrating ripples of water, before panning out to show clusters of people on docks. As the camera grazes over a weeping willow and secluded forestry, it alternates between showing stagnant time-lapse footage and jerky, almost stop-motion-like visual effects. A similar frame of rippling water opens up the Shanghai portion, but this time the mood is hastened with the horn from a large barge. In a shot of the subway, the film speed is running so fast that there’s no time to focus on any passers by, the visuals matching the heightened pace of the music, panning and twitching in time with the aural effects.What B6 does best in this piece is capture the rich saturations of natural existing colors on film. Without dialogue or a storyline he emphasizes both the deathly stillness of nature and nighttime and the spastic energy of city life and daytime. The consistent stream of minimalistic music—layered over white noise from water, chatter, and traffic—almost works to brings out feelings of urgency in the naturalistic Hangzhou setting while imparting a sense of peacefulness within the busyness of Shanghai.