A Storytelling Live Performance Blending Sound Composition, Archive, and Dream

In this 30min sound story, my aim was to tell about resilience. 

The first step to it happened in the recording studio where I composed and conducted for a string septet. Inspired by Iannis Xenakis and his microtonal compositions I constructed a piece where each instrument holds a different and together form a seven tone chord, from there, using the string sliding technique, they all move on together to a secondary chord carrying different meaning, and from there to the next carrying different emotions. With this technique, the listener is sliding from chord in a microtonal madness, with each chord telling the different chapter of a specific story, the one of Palestinian Resilience: Peace, Pain and Rebirth. 

For the stage, I then stretched out this 3min piece into a 30min piece to create a drone, constantly moving, exploring microtonality and really delving into each intricate change from chord to chord, millimetre by millimetre on each of the 7 strings the player were sliding on. 

Using granular synthesis I was able to modify the long drone throughout my performance, adding more intensity to the already complex composition. 

On top I carefully layered various street recordings that I had done in Beirut and some that my dear friend, the DJ and producer YA Z AN recorded in Ramallah. The street recordings were modified to appear as dreamy, in pain, or exploding with musicality: aiming to represent the hearts of middle eastern people. You could hear recordings of musicians in the streets, people talking, my grandfather telling stories, the voice of Leila Khaled, my wife’s reciting Tawfiq Zayyad, interviews from the Great March of Return.

For the performance I also utilised my knowledge in sampling to borrow stems from various songs I love from artists such as Gil Scott-Heron, Swans, David Lynch, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Eskenderella. By taking the drums from one, the melody from the other, the bass from another, I was able to create on the spot whole new pieces of music, the ones I have in mind when I picture different emotions such as resilience, empowerment, love and pain. All the samples were heavily modified to deepen the meaning of each emotion and the effects were manipulated live to reflect my own emotions while playing them. All of this on top of the string septet drone I had created. 

The overall performance was a dream-like soundscape filled with raw passion, emotional impacts and storytelling. Played in the center of a room, surrounded with speakers and the crowd.