Surrogate Cities is Heiner Goebbels's large work for orchestra, sampler and voices, a set of pieces about the modern city, its machinery, its violence and the vulnerable individual inside it. The Alte Oper Frankfurt commissioned it in 1994, for the 20th anniversary of the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie and the 1200th anniversary of Frankfurt. It is one of his most experimental scores and, in parts, one of his most accessible. Goebbels described it as an attempt to read the city as a text.

The orchestra plays under Peter Rundel, the conductor Goebbels names for the work's first performances. The orchestral sessions were recorded in 1996 at Bayerischer Rundfunk in Munich, as a co-production with the radio, and the vocals were added in Frankfurt in 1999. The singers are the soul and jazz vocalist Jocelyn B. Smith and the free improviser David Moss. Goebbels and Manfred Eicher produced the album and mixed it with Jan Erik Kongshaug at Rainbow Studio, Oslo.

The opening Suite for Sampler and Orchestra lays Baroque dance forms (chaconne, allemande, gigue, sarabande) over field sounds from Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Lyon and St Petersburg. Industrial noise and recordings of Jewish cantors, among them Gershon Sirota and Joseph Schmidt, are sampled into the texture. The Horatian sets Heiner Müller's version of Livy's story of Rome and Alba as three songs for Smith. Surrogate builds ostinatos under a text by Hugo Hamilton, delivered at full force by Moss. The closing In the Country of Last Things takes its words from Paul Auster's novel of a city in collapse. The purely orchestral D & C draws on Kafka's story The City Coat of Arms.

In BBC Music Magazine, Andrew Clements heard "jazz licks and rock riffs" that "constantly erupt through the surface", and ended simply: "Amazing stuff." For Andy Hamilton in Classic CD, the music was "uniquely both accessible and experimental", with sampling and percussion taken from art-rock and dance genres. The Munich and Frankfurt sessions produced seventy minutes of music, drawn from a full concert work of about ninety.

This is the CD edition of ECM New Series 1688, released in 2000, with a 54-page booklet containing the sung texts in English, German and French.