Bruno.

Fifteen minutes on foot separate Bruno's studio in Cours Julien from the Noailles market. It's the route he walks almost every morning — late by the rest of the world's standards, early for someone who breaks down stages until two. Noailles smells of spices and fruit stacked in wooden crates. The stalls spill out onto the sidewalk. Bruno always goes to the same place: an Algerian greengrocer who sets aside large eggplants for him because she knows he makes tajine. They don't say more than three sentences each time.

The praying mantis is a waiting animal. It can stay motionless for entire minutes until it detects exactly what it needs. Bruno works the same way in a store, on a street, or in front of a mixing desk: he observes, doesn't intervene, and when he acts, it's fast and precise. At the vegetable stall, he knows what he wants before he gets there. He pays, nods, leaves. At the Tunisian bar below his building, the owner puts mint tea down without asking because he's been coming for years without needing to order it. He drinks the tea, listens to the conversations around him for forty minutes and goes upstairs. They've never formally introduced themselves.

Cours Julien is his neighborhood — a former tailor's workshop converted into a twenty-eight-square-meter studio, three-and-a-half-meter ceilings, pale green walls. When he steps onto the balcony in his chartreuse jacket, the neighbors might mistake him for part of the foliage. It's a neighborhood of murals, terraces and people who don't bother asking why you come home at three in the morning. For someone who needs two or three hours a day without social stimulation, that's almost a requirement.

Marseille has a rhythm that most Mediterranean cities don't share. The mistral changes everything — the mood, the noise, the light. When it blows hard, the port sounds different: masts clanging, mooring lines tensing, a tin can rolling along the Pharo dock. Bruno knows those sounds because he's been walking this city for nine years at hours when most people are asleep. For someone who works with live sound, every street has its own acoustics: Noailles with its stalls and overlapping voices, the port with the wind against the hulls of the boats, Cours Julien with the echoes of a terrace emptying out at two in the morning.

On Sundays, when he doesn't work, he cooks something that takes time — ratatouille, tajine, something on a low flame for over an hour — and stays home reading about acoustics or insects, his other subject since childhood. In summer it's different: open windows, festivals on the Mediterranean circuit between Barcelona, Cádiz and Salonica, long runs along the corniche at eleven at night.