What happens to a city when the people disappear?
Not in the spectacular language of apocalypse, but quietly. No catastrophe to witness, no final dramatic gesture—only buildings, streets, façades, walls, and infrastructure continuing to exist after the urgency of human life has vanished from them.
That question sits at the center of Adriano Zanni’s forthcoming album, Post Dub Cities, arriving October 2 via Bronson Recordings. A photographer, sound artist, and field recordist, Zanni has spent years exploring the relationship between environments and the people who temporarily occupy them. On this project, he removes those people almost entirely.
The result is less dystopian than strangely peaceful.
Built from ten tracks alongside three additional pieces, Post Dub Cities uses the vocabulary of dub—subtraction, echo, repetition, resonance, negative space—to imagine cities as entities capable of existing beyond their inhabitants. Its opening single, “Crisopoli,” transforms the urban landscape into an echo chamber, where what has disappeared remains perceptible only through reverberation. Like a bass frequency continuing to vibrate after its original source has stopped, human presence becomes something sensed rather than seen.
That same philosophy extends into the photographic work accompanying the album. Images captured over more than two decades across cities including Belgrade, Venice, Lisbon, Sarajevo, Naples, Tehran, Hanoi, and others have been emptied of people through careful framing and editing. Without crowds determining how we interpret them, these places become architecture before they become destinations. Their surfaces, geometry, deterioration, and silence begin speaking for themselves.
Zanni’s relationship between photography and sound is not decorative. The two practices operate according to the same logic. A photograph removes movement and noise. Dub removes the central voice and allows its ghost to remain. Both ask us to pay closer attention to what survives after the obvious subject disappears.
Rather than imagining humanity’s absence as something horrific, Post Dub Cities finds a peculiar serenity in impermanence. Civilizations end. Meanings disappear. Monuments survive the people who understood why they were built. What initially feels melancholy gradually becomes something closer to liberation: the realization that cities belong to time far more than they belong to us.
We spoke with Adriano Zanni about absence as creative material, the relationship between photography and dub, the fictional potential of environmental sound, architecture without witnesses, and what empty cities might teach us about the crowded ones we currently inhabit.
Post Dub Cities imagines a world where cities remain but humanity has disappeared, leaving architecture, sound, and memory to speak for themselves. What first inspired you to explore absence rather than presence as the central theme of the album?
The project grew out of photographs I’d been accumulating over the years, taken between 2003 and 2025 in dozens of different cities—Belgrade, Vienna, Lisbon, Cairo, Tehran, Venice—with the intention of capturing them in moments or places where human presence was already minimal, and which I later removed entirely through a long process of editing.
Absence isn’t a void: it’s a space that forces the eye to focus on what remains—architecture, light, structure—and that lets you sense, by contrast, everything we normally take for granted in the life of a city, leaving only its bare body, its container.
You’re both a photographer and a sound artist, and this project feels impossible to separate from its visual counterpart. Do you experience these two disciplines as parallel practices, or do they constantly inform one another throughout your creative process?
For me they’re the same inquiry carried out with two different tools.
The project began as a hypothetical photobook, but I thought of it with a sonic logic from the very start: each image is like a dub track with the “main subject” removed, leaving only echo, delay, resonance.
The move from the book to the audio tracks for the vinyl wasn’t a later adaptation, it was the natural consequence of an idea that was already dual from the beginning, as is almost always the case in my work.
The opening track, “Crisopoli,” transforms the city into what you describe as an “echo chamber” of what is no longer there. What fascinates you about reverberation not only as a sonic technique, but as a metaphor for memory and history?
Dub works by subtraction: it takes away the voice, takes away the central instrument, and lets the echo go on telling a story about something that’s no longer there.
That’s exactly what happens when you photograph a city emptied of people. What remains are traces, marks, worn surfaces, and those traces “reverberate” a human presence that has passed.
Memory works the same way: it doesn’t preserve the event, only its echo.
Throughout Post Dub Cities, familiar places such as Belgrade, Venice, Lisbon, Tehran, and Naples become strangely transformed once human activity is removed. What do you think we discover about a place when we stop looking at the people who inhabit it?
I don’t actually think they become anonymous. I think we discover their more honest structure, what resists once daily function is interrupted.
Very different cities like Sarajevo, Prague, or Naples, stripped of the crowd that usually defines them, reveal unexpected affinities: the same light on the walls, the same geometry in the empty streets.
It’s a way of looking at architecture as an autonomous language, not merely as a backdrop to human life.
Field recordings play a fundamental role in your broader work, preserving the subtle textures of real environments. How do you decide which sounds become part of the composition, and at what point does documentary transform into fiction?
Field recordings stay faithful only up to a point. They capture the real texture of a place, but the moment they’re isolated and recontextualized alongside images of “depopulated” cities, they stop being documents and become narrative material.
The line shifts at the point where the sound begins to serve the imagined atmosphere more than the record of the real place.
That said, for this project I didn’t actually use conventional field recordings. I worked with mental, abstract ones instead: a whole range of found and artificially created sounds capable of redefining the urban atmospheres I wanted to describe.
Dub music has always embraced space, repetition, and absence as much as rhythm. What drew you to dub as the ideal language for exploring abandoned landscapes and imagined futures?
Dub has always treated space, silence, and repetition as elements just as important as melody or rhythm.
It’s a genre born from subtraction—taking away in order to let something emerge.
Working on emptied urban landscapes, dub struck me as a sonic language capable of respecting that same logic: not filling, but letting things resonate.
There’s a philosophical thread running through the album about impermanence and the inevitable disappearance of civilizations. Do you see Post Dub Cities as a meditation on mortality, an environmental reflection, or something broader about the human condition?
The project is dedicated to the memory of Gabriele Basilico and Sly Dunbar, two figures who, in very different fields, worked precisely on space and absence.
That says a lot about the tone of the work: more than a dystopian prediction, it’s a reflection on impermanence.
Civilizations, like cities, are transitory. Morselli’s Dissipatio H.G., along with Calvino’s Le città invisibili, guided me more on a structural than a narrative level, as conceptual frameworks for thinking about cities that exist and, at the same time, no longer exist.
Your black-and-white photography often feels suspended outside of time, much like the music itself. Was it important that the visual and sonic worlds resist offering clear narratives, allowing listeners and viewers to construct their own meanings?
Yes, that was a deliberate choice.
Both the black-and-white images and the dub tracks avoid telling a single, univocal story. I prefer to let the viewer or listener build their own path, a bit like walking through a city you don’t know, with no fixed destination.
Although the album imagines deserted cities, it doesn’t feel dystopian so much as quietly contemplative. Were you more interested in evoking melancholy, serenity, or curiosity as listeners move through these imagined spaces?
The idea of dystopia interests me very little, and the reason behind this hypothetical disappearance of human presence matters just as little.
What I was after was a contemplative suspension.
The empty cities I’ve portrayed don’t communicate danger, but silence—a silence that invites you to look more closely, not to be afraid.
Post Dub Cities ends with the return of everyday life, breaking the spell of this imagined future. After guiding listeners through these ghostly landscapes, what do you hope they notice differently when they step back into the crowded cities they inhabit every day?
After crossing these ghostly landscapes, my hope is that the way people look at a crowded city shifts slightly—that they start noticing details we normally find insignificant: the façades, the light, the architecture, the spaces that usually stay hidden behind the noise of everyday life.
A bit like listening again to a song once you finally know its dub version.
