LA: rising from the ashes
The book, Alta – A Human Atlas of a City of Angels, won Best Self-Published Book Award in the 2025 British Book Design & Production Awards
How do you capture the spirit of a city? Producer Matt Hill describes a documentary series ten years in the making: Intersections.
As LA rebuilds following the devastating wildfires in January, a timely podcast, book and exhibition has been released documenting 100 of its citizens.
With original music by Brian Eno, this is a project very close to everyone at Rethink Audio - where we believe everything we do should be made with community, empathy and sustainability at its heart.
I’ve worked with Marcus Lyon now for almost a decade. Our first collaboration was an app called Somos Brasil - which became the first of what is now called A Human Atlas.
These projects require a small team, led my Marcus, working with local groups to identify 100 community champions - who are then photographed and interviewed, and a DNA sample taken to understand the story of the city.
Producer Sarah Myles then worked with Marcus to select the stories and weave them into ten ‘chapters’ using sound recorded on location in LA and Eno’s incredible score.
The result is a multi award-winning book, app, exhibition and podcast series that travels the world.
Supported by the Getty Conservation Institute, Intersections: Los Angeles is the second series. The first, based in Detroit, won a bronze award at the British Podcast Awards 2024.
“An artful audio tapestry about a bruised but resilient town focused on renewal [ ...] Those who, like me, come to this series knowing little about Detroit beyond the big historical markers — cars, Motown, economic decline — get a different picture, one that is full of creativity and community, and one in which a bright future beckons.”