It’s a difficult endeavor to sonify the atmosphere of dread and fatigue felt by many residents in Beirut, Lebanon, during the summer of 2021. And yet, Ziad Moukarzel attempts to do just that on his short walk in the city where one could hear the heightened sounds of machines and the muffled utterances of people. In the absence of words to describe this difficult summer, Moukarzel allows us to auscultate the sounds of everyday life.

«A Walk in the Summer» captures one of my regular walks from the studio to my place. I attached the recorder to my laptop bag and recorded while walking on different days and taking different roads. I recorded some bits around the house and some in the studio too. I generated music using the ambiance recorded, and stopped to listen when there was silence. I was trying to catch the mundane without focusing on one thing, just a general overall feeling: the sound of my walking, the sound of the street, the generator, and the distorted audio. The dialogues are inaudible, interrupted, and/or unfinished.

The summer of 2021, like the one before it, like a lot of other summers, was uneasy, to say the least. The city had survived a blast, but little did we know that the ongoing downfall was not yet over.