The ARFI Collective Goes on a Journey to a City and Its Surroundings: Marseille

The project is an exploration followed by, after reconnaissance, an immersion at the heart of the viewpoints and sound expressions emerging from landscapes, human communities, or individual voices. We hope to uncover general and complex tonalities, bringing forth the sounds that stand out from them or those that connect them.

Within these universes, a solo musician is invited to invent, embody, and reveal the music of these places and people around us, whom we may not consciously perceive in our daily lives. Sounds of nature as well as those of people at work, machines, factories, architectures, and urban activity create the music so dear to John Cage: the music of life.

At the heart of these sounds, the improviser’s challenge is to be open, to be carried away, and to respond to the symphonies of chance and local contingencies that this chosen or imposed world offers us at every moment.

“The Scents of the Thread” aims to create a series of sound objects, photographs, stories, and poems. Sensitive testimonies or fictions of reality, these captures of the moment, in situ, invite us to recombine the ephemeral works surrounding us.

Thus, each musician of the collective is invited alone for a full day on an excursion in Marseille and its surroundings, like a unique piece of the sound and musical puzzle that characterizes the collective. Like a passing of the baton, the thread is passed on, leaving here and there the scents and fragrances of these multiple excursions.