My city roars.
Like yours, it is constantly changing, driven by silent, powerful forces. Beneath my feet, an invisible metro line cuts through ruins — neighborhoods, dead ends, streets. Construction sites, machines, bodies in motion. Clatter, tremors, textures: raw, living, untamed sounds.
I walk with microphones, gathering these sounds not to freeze them, but to move through them — to hear what, amid the chaos, tries to speak differently.
These noises become stories, presences that awaken a numb urban imagination. Reactivating it is a form of situated resistance, rooted in places, cracks, and transformation.
By letting these often-dismissed sounds resonate, construction sites stop being mere breaches in the city and become breaths.
Giving voice to places in transition, reclaiming through listening a power over what slips away. Trying to bring forth another city — more sensitive, more porous — where even the roar becomes a material for dreaming.
A sound piece built entirely from field recordings. It offers a dive into the intimate soundscape of urban change, a renewed listening to emerging landscapes where ecology is found in friction, disorder, and force.
Field recordings and composition: Mathias Guilbaud
Produced with the support of SEMI SILENT in the frame of SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES 2024.
Photo: Guilhem Hergott
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Mathias Guilbaud is a Toulouse-based sound artist working with field recordings and acousmatic composition. His work explores the sonic textures of urban transformation, the poetics of construction sites, and the intimate intersections between public spaces and personal narratives. Through his electroacoustic pieces, he seeks to awaken new ways of listening to cities in flux, revealing the hidden layers beneath everyday noise.
As a multidisciplinary artist, Mathias collaborates with performing arts companies, community radios, and film projects.