Djellali El Ouzeri

I wish to develop a research project focusing on musical and sound creation between Atlanta and Marseille, a sound architecture project that centers on urbanism, urbanity, unity and musical culture. Since 2000, these two cities, where history and politics have profound effects on the inhabitants, have had multiple convergences that I wish to explore through sound.  

The MarsTlanta project will be a sound creation project based on a collection of musical archives and sound recordings of words and street noises—soundscapes—of the two cities. The objective is to create a bridge between Marseille and Atlanta through and for hip-hop culture by transmitting an on-the-ground analysis of these sounds that make up our everyday and that define our environment.

With my vision created through more than 30 active years in hip-hop culture, I now want to take a closer look. The portraits of cities created through music and sound—sonic portraits—offer a unique vision that allows us to perceive the very souls of these cities. It can describe the way that citizens interpret and continue to share living memories that consist of music, sound, time, and place. Numerous themes will be explored: architecture, sociology, cultural and political movements, city transformation, population displacement and gentrification. I intend to use sound recording and MAO to mix, connect, and combine sounds, noises, and voices that are found in our close environments, in Atlanta as well as in Marseille. To do this, it will be important for me to meet and exchange with social organizers, historians, urban planners, activists, artists and, of course, the local public to discuss what characterizes the city’s past, present, and future. 

Marseille and Atlanta, two cities of the South marked by their rich histories and transformations, lands of migration and social inequality, seem to me to be the ideal grounds for this exercise in sound mirroring.   

Just as Atlanta and its singular soundscape are major influences in the American rap industry, Marseille brings a specific and unique sound to the French rap scene, exemplified by IAM and the Fonky Family, or the PSY4. Both scenes share the drive to strongly defend local culture and to counter the sometimes-denigrating view of secondary cities.  

These two cities have been able to transmit their unique musical innovations like a signature, becoming far more than simply a generational phenomenon. This innovation–from the resounding originality of Outkasts’s tracks to the advent of T.I.’s Trap–is mirrored in Marseille’s rap scenes of all generations: the musical rap of IAM, the street rap of FF or PSY4, and the newschool sounds of Jul and SCH. 

These artistic phenomena have had a strong media impact and have certainly influenced the idea that Altanta and Marseille are laboratories for social and ecological transition, suggesting that this force of innovation permeates all aspects of the city (art, culture and society, architecture, and urban planning). But these transitions, or even gentrifications, which are positive in principle, can also be violent and generate ruptures for the most fragile inhabitants. It interests me to look closely, with a sensitive eye, at the reality of how urbanism is organized and modified at a swift pace, and to describe its impact on social and cultural life.