Sometimes a city is better understood by listening than by looking.
Cities exist when they emit sound; noise brings them to life. The idea of silent cities in gentrified neighbourhoods is frightening. The sounds of traffic, and those small noises a fan, a pipe, the bus braking, create the map of the city, they give it meaning; without noise, everything becomes flat, like photos without depth.
I think we are being taught to believe that noise is a nuisance. In Brooklyn, for example, music in barbershops was banned because it disturbed the wealthier families moving into a neighbourhood where music and noise were part of its identity. I believe that noise sometimes just asks to be heard differently, as if it were a wordless language, a way of saying, “This is happening here and now.”
In cities, we are very busy and pay little attention. By contrast, Indigenous American communities living in rural areas have the highest number of reported alien sightings. I think it’s because they are more open and attuned to spirituality. There is a book that documents these accounts, Encounters with the Star People by Ardy Sixkiller Clarke, an author who has worked closely with Indigenous communities in the United States, focusing on giving voice to their stories, traditions, and experiences. Jeff Mills, one of Detroit techno’s pioneers, made a record and a series of live performances based on it. I like to think this relates to the frequency each person is tuned to and to the different ways we perceive sound.
For neighbours who have never heard it, techno music can sound like an annoying construction site, yet, there are people who travel hundreds of kilometres to listen to it for hours on end. Street raves or sound system parties built by artistic communities have attracted audiences for years; consider the ruta del bakalao in Spain.
This movement of noise and machines has been embraced by cities that have been able to act as a megaphone for a cultural movement (Berlin, Tokyo, Detroit, etc). Interestingly, most of these are industrial cities, where the people who began making music worked in or had connections to factories and their repetitive noises. It’s as if mechanical repetition became a mantra or a kind of trance. Urban areas where the hum of factories was a kind of collective heartbeat, and artists transformed that pulse into structures, into music that has made communities vibrate for years in clubs, raves, and legal or illegal parties all over the world.
Cities have their acoustic cartography. Some communities hear the world differently. Some distinguish messages in noise or signals in the vibration of the ground, just as others find geometry in urban chaos.
Your sculpture, Timsam, can be seen as a bridge between these modes of perception, an antenna that captures frequencies we usually ignore or even, taken further, a piece that speaks from a place where the spiritual and the mechanical touch. It proposes another way of listening. A way to tune perception to lower, slower, deeper frequencies. I think it is not something to understand, but to resonate with. I believe that when something material vibrates, it is trying to tell us something.
In reference to our conversations about the sound systems of India, Jamaica, and Mexico, these are the street and community versions of the same idea. Huge systems, handcrafted and designed to sound loud and make many people vibrate… Sound built with boxes, cables, wood, and metal. There, music is like a portable sculpture. For many, it is noise, but for others, a form of identity. A frequency that unites neighbours, streets, and generations.
What connects cities like Detroit with street sound systems is the idea that sound is not decorative but structural. It shapes how we imagine the future and how a community can be organised. David Byrne writes in his book How Music Works that music exists because bodies need to move in certain spaces. A club with low ceilings produces denser music; an auditorium, more expansive music. Detroit may have created techno because the city itself was already a rhythmic industrial machine. In Mexico or India, these sound systems were built because the streets are the stage, a natural habitat for sound.
It suggests that, sometimes, you need to listen to a city in order to understand it. And perhaps that is why your work, Timsam, feels like a condensation of all this. Cities do not seek to explain themselves; they seek to resonate. And in that resonance, you notice something simple but very powerful, you only need to stop and listen to what is around you. When something vibrates, it is alive and telling you that something is happening, and above all, that you should not miss it.
When you tune your perception and reach the right frequency, you let yourself be pierced by these things.
Pablo Skaf, friend.