Beirut Birds طيور بيروت

Here is something about and from a contemporary young artist from Beirut, Lebanon. Nour Sokhon is a truly multidisciplinary artist creating dynamic sound spectra of strong undercurrent expressiveness. I saw her several times performing live (at Punkt Festival, Gaudeamus Festival, Hennie Onstage Center) and worked with her (at Schwere Reiter, Munich). For me she is a forceful and imaginative multi-dimensional, multi-layered creator of sound visions permeated by social and political tissues and realities. .

Daily life in urban chaos from relative peaceful times to times of catastrophe and horrible war have their significant sounds people are surrounded by and taken in and lived by, sounds that resonate in their feeling and memories. Human voices in various modes mingle with it and our memory speaks in inner voices and images.

Beirut Birds طيور بيروت, created by multidisciplinary artist Nour Sokhon, is a sonic memory capsule honoring (inter)personal stories of migration, displacement, and the cyclical turbulent circumstances in Lebanon. 

Nour Sokhon has undertaken and recorded interviews with diasporas and repatriates to commemorate, share, heal, and envision. These source materials become the album’s core elements that loop, narrate, and return throughout time, with herself responding with both instruments and her voice. Chanting in dialogue with the interviewees, crafting near-mantras, she further congregates these materially-rooted sound-scapes by including field recordings that she gleaned during 2018–2021 in Lebanon and her subsequent move to Berlin. 

The pieces contain manipulated sounds from objects that symbolize migration, such as office bells, a luggage wheel, car parts, and bureaucratic paperwork interwoven with and carried by Nour Sokhon’s enriching improvisations on classical piano, electronics, synthesizers, violin, and various percussion instruments.

(text adapted from bandcamp where you can have a listen to the music)

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