“Sur le chemin” – Mathieu Goust
From Volos to Stagiates: a living soundscape for Vasilis Maggos.
The art of soundscapes rarely focuses on social reality. It usually takes abstract paths. The work “Sur le chemin” by French musician Mathieu Goust is an exception in this regard. It moves with care and sensitivity along a fine line between testimony, field recordings, and live music. It manages to touch upon the most immediate and painful social reality without following any easy or predetermined formula. It lends the listening experience a political dimension.
At the heart of this musical and audio work lies a voice: the voice of Yannis Maggos, Vasilis’s father. In June 2020, Vasilis—who had been involved in Volos’s environmental and social movements since childhood—was arrested at a protest against the incineration of waste carried out, and still carried out today, by the Lafarge cement plant on the outskirts of the city. While in custody, he was brutally beaten. He died a few weeks later.
A few months later, his father carved out, in memory of his son, a trail that bears his name and connects the city of Volos with the village of Stagiates. Father and son used to walk together in the mountains and forests of the area. Vasilis’s Trail is a hiking route that is now visited by children, couples, groups of young people, and the elderly. But it is also a political gesture, a response to loss, and a tribute.
In 2023, Mathieu traveled from Strasbourg to Pelion to meet Yannis. At one point along the way, sheltered from the wind, he asked him to describe the trail and explain what had motivated him to blaze it. In this account, Vasilis’s story gradually emerges through his very description of the trail: from the types of trees one encounters to the changes in the landscape. It is as if the trail itself is telling the story, and as if the trees themselves are speaking about police violence, injustice, and the suppression of environmental struggles—but also about the beauty and vitality of resistance.
As they walked together, Mathieu also recorded the sounds of the natural environment. He left the voice as is, unedited, and placed it at the center of a unique soundscape. This soundscape is performed live each time. The music combines acoustic instruments (percussion and objects), analog synthesizers, and field recordings. It accompanies the testimony, leaves room for it, and transforms it into a journey. The narrative unfolds before the audience’s eyes.
The power of the work stems from the very gesture that gave rise to it. Through the path he has opened, Yannis Maggos transforms mourning into a journey open to everyone and into a place where people encounter nature. The performance brings this path to the stage and invites the audience to traverse it through sound.
The work “Sur le chemin” engages in a dialogue with a series of works that bring real voices to the heart of music: Steve Reich’s Different Trains (1988), in which recorded testimonies become musical material; Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s research, which treats listening as a means of bearing witness to state violence; and Janet Cardiff’s audio walks, in which walking becomes a form of storytelling.
After all, this is one of the functions of music: to transform experiences, to shed light in unexpected ways on aspects of social life and our shared history. And, ultimately, to bring together an audience that, for an hour, shares a story and makes it its own.
● Mathieu Goust developed the project based on an initial idea by Dimitris Alexakis and Fotini Banou (KET).
● The testimony was recorded with the assistance of Solal Goust and Dimitris Alexakis.
◍ Mathieu Goust has been playing percussion since he was seven years old. He started out with cardboard detergent barrels and wooden spoons and gradually expanded his collection of instruments. Self-taught, he broadened his musical horizons through travel and encounters. Around the age of nineteen, he began exploring electronic music, without giving up the drums and percussion.
Today, with more than thirty years of experience, he is more interested in artistic forms than in musical genres. That is why he works in such a wide variety of fields: from singing, jazz, and electronic music to theater (street and stage), circus, dance, literary readings, and children’s performances.
In recent years, he has collaborated regularly with singer-songwriter Yoanna, the all-female group Les Clandestines, the Mediterranean music ensemble Electrik GEM, the electro-jazz group Notilus, and the Strasbourg Choreographic Center.
Photos: Dimitris Alexakis