Sonic Unraveling

Sound Essays & Music Journalism

The unending trials of finding a better god

At the concert, working-class folk rush, but collectively they look stagnant. The pressure of constant friction has put them in progressive stasis, orbiting a light. In the hadra of the Mouath’en, working-class women and working-class men extend their limbs in hopes of catching most of the light.

From the bottom of a reactor

The city was calm on that Sunday afternoon. There was a midday offensive at the Southern border, the casual type mind you. They were showing families going up the hills overlooking the battlefields; perhaps in an act of defiance, perhaps only to watch the fireworks. They say that if you hear the sound of an approaching missile, then it has already hit the target. All you’re left with in your remaining moments of deduction is how close you are to it.

Amorphous arab

Can one pursue the past through reimagining the present? Veteran musician Yacoub Abu Ghosh and sound experimentalist Rehab Hazgui talk to Norient about merging tradition with recent techniques at the Mirath: Music Sound Exhibition, a project by the Goethe-Institut.

_{Hearing Out a Window

For Rewired Festival 2024
The city is loud again. Sirens and honks as a backdrop of an erratic soundscape. Chatter, chatter, chatter – pedestrians trying to make sense of blurred phone conversations. A colloquial cacophony. Motorbikes whizz in a hurry, always in a hurry, a dwindling solo, loud cooling systems on the rhythm section. Everyone seems to be agitated – especially the steel box drivers. Busy, busy beggars, catcalling the brick walls to get their voices back.}

The Making of KOAST: Unfiltered, Unhindered, and Heading South

_{Flowing down the stream, KOAST picks up her inspirations and experiences along the way, they become part of her making, and she weaves them into new forms of expression. While breaking through an eclectic range of genres and styles, she can be found singing English lyrics in Arabic scales, or Arabic lyrics on Afro-beat. For KOAST, this amalgamation of sounds and inspirations comes as an organic pursuit of self-indulgence.}

Autotune Rebellion: A Rupturing Cypher on the Fringes of Lebanon’s Music Scene

_{For Beirut and Beyond International Music Festival 2025
The sudden presence of some 12-15 rappers, producers, and collaborators on stage was pleasantly overwhelming. Maybe not as much for the technicians who rushed to live EQ a capricious range of flows, treating one cadence after the other. And at times when Ghanim’s hard drive would give out, or the generator stalled, the verses would turn acappella, or live drums would replace the beats in defiance, somewhat symbolically, of structural and regional challenges insisting that the show must go on.}

_{Between hunger and famine: From the scene with El Rass & Ziad Nawfal

To all those who have written and still write about how Beirut is the city of contradictions, it’s time to realize that the city is, in fact, a land of contradicting realities. These realities overlap, create, and destroy each other almost viciously. So perhaps in apocalyptic times like these, it could be helpful to ask ourselves which reality we are subscribing to, and which we are succumbing to.}

_{Theatrics of Life: Aia Atoui Dives into the Human Condition

In the time of confinement, Aia Atoui picks up a camera and finds herself studying her neighborhood. She generates an affinity for sitting on her balcony to observe the passers-by, capturing strangers in a moment of existential unraveling as they stand and stare at nothing, or come around at the usual time to perform their small part in the grand stage of the mundane.}

Trouble in deep slumber: Liliane Chlela rattles the cage

_{There’s no stage in the city that Liliane hasn’t performed on. Throughout the years, she has scaled and built her own version of home. On a dimly lit stage in Mar Mikhael, a few hundred meters away from an ammonium-ridden destiny, she sat shoulder to shoulder with ingenious jazz composer Tarek Yamani. Amidst her simple, time-tested setup, she engineered a sonic conversation of rhythm and resonance.}

Longing and Belonging: Lynn Adib’s Journey Through Jazz

_{After her striking performance at Global Week for Syria (in Beirut) the night before, it took me ten minutes of waiting in the sun-lit streets of Gemmayzeh to wake Lynn up. She invites me to the naturally lit balcony of an Airbnb she had booked on the occasion of this performance. Between the sharp noises of early truck drivers making their daily deliveries and the sporadic interruptions from her daughter Sarah, who seemed oblivious to the fact that her mom was being interviewed but keen on finding some morning entertainment, we managed to have a conversation about her musical journey of longing and belonging.}

A Laid-Back El Rass Butchers Heads with a Smile in ‘Vodka W Cerelac’

_{Seen in his urban element, shifting between ridiculing pseudo rapper careers on a day swing, to chopping up big mogul heads in the kitchen, El Rass seems to be having fun. While he takes jabs at rappers’ rhythmic incoherence, he also serves them a lesson in consonance, making syllable play and alliteration look as simple as breathing, and what’s more boastful than an untamed, unquestionable level of skill?}

The People's Radio: Reflecting on One Remarkable Year of Radio AlHara

_{A year ago around this time, I sat at my bedroom work desk to write about a pirate radio station that emerged from the shackles of lockdown to broadcast to a melancholic world. Back then, the radio was still an exciting notion filled with ‘what ifs’ and ‘what could be. A year and thousands of broadcasting hours later, I sat down with the boys from ‘the neighborhood’ again to discuss how a lockdown sensation turned into a global movement with local roots.}

majd shidiac

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