16.11.27 / Marché d’Aligre / This is one of my favorite recordings that I captured whilst in Paris / Its the sound of a proper French market, captured early enough that the din of traffic is barely present, giving the recording room to breathe / This alone would be something to get out of bed for on a Saturday morning as a Parisian / As I arrive in the neighborhood, the quarter is just stirring / I see virtually no one on the streets / Suddenly as I turn a corner I find the market / Rows and rows of vegetable stalls, with just the last few boxes still being unpacked from graffiti plastered vans / As I walk down the road I am invited to view the produce / The call that rings out in the recording is simply the price – “un euro, un euro, un euro…” / Only when I reach the central square do I become aware of how big the market is / To one side stands an indoor market selling meats, cheeses, fish, flowers, and vegetables / To the other is a flea market / It holds all sorts of things, including second hand books, old vinyls, a plethora of bric-a-brack and a several stalls with a wide selection of African artifacts / The flea market rests in the shadows of a semicircular 8-storey apartment block / Between the flea market and the indoor market, a long row of fabric-roofed market stalls stretches into the distance; each one selling fresh produces from across the world / Before I start recording I do several laps of the market to get a feel for it / By the time I’m in position to record, the market is already twice as busy / Parisians commence their weekly ritual, exploring the vast options available / The rustle of vegetables being picked and placed into plastic bags can be heard throughout the recording / Adjusting to the French way of life and actually enjoying it were two different stages that I wasn’t expecting to encounter individually / Spending time with a French family included such practices / Each week we visited a market in the suburbs / Whilst I wasn’t obliged to come it was seen as a family event / Again the traditions continued from the market right to the dinner table / Often we would spend hours for a food sitting, starting with an aperitif, followed by a starter, then the main course, then desert, then cheese, and finally a coffee / In my family household in the UK, the other aspects of life would take priority / Eating, if together, would often have been a short lived affair, usually with a television playing in the background / Convenience was the only thing that mattered when buying food, which was normally acquired in the form of the antithesis to the Parisian market: an online supermarket shop / Only when I started visiting markets on my own did I begin to understand the enjoyment of the process / There is a sense of contentness in the voices that we can hear in the recording / The purposefulness, repetition and simplicity of waking up early to choose good quality food for you and your loved ones to share, has an air of integrity to it //
About the Artist:
Ben Gale (https://soundcloud.com/ben-gale-location-recording)(Somerset, UK 1991) is a field recordist and sound editor currently living in the south of France / His passion for field recording began whilst studying music technology at university, when he attended a sound recording course in Iceland / Since then he has been exploring the sonic world around him and gaining experience in capturing fragments of it / This is Ben’s first field recording release / Ben’s other work includes location recording and sound editing for film and documentary, as well as his ongoing personal project producing childrens’ audiobooks with binaural sound design //
