Beirut Birds by Nour Sokhon

All digital album sales are donated to Haven for Artists, a feminist arts initiative from Beirut that is currently helping displaced families in Lebanon. The proceeds from the vinyl album cover the production costs and support the artist.

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Beirut Birds (طيور بيروت) is a sonic memory capsule honoring (inter)personal stories of migration, displacement, and the cyclical turbulent circumstances in Lebanon. Transforming her multi-year project, multidisciplinary artist and composer Nour Sokhon crystallizes the performance Beirut Birds (طيور بيروت) into her long-awaited debut album. When presented and performed live, it is accompanied by juxtaposed images of the Lebanese capital’s city life and avian migration across the Mediterranean Sea, representing themes strongly woven into the music.

In her variegated artistic process, Nour 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 Nour responding with both instruments and her voice. Chanting in dialogue with the interviewees, crafting near-mantras, Nour further congregates these materially-rooted soundscapes by including field recordings that she gleaned during 2018–2021 in Lebanon and her subsequent move to Berlin.

Embedded within the composition are manipulated sounds from objects that symbolize migration, such as office bells, a luggage wheel, car parts, and bureaucratic paperwork. Musically, the songs are enriched by Nour’s improvisations on classical piano, electronics, synthesizers, violin, and various percussion instruments. As time is sculpted and the layers blur, words become specters, while an entropic orchestra of drums and melody rises, giving shape to an in-between space for those who have left, and stayed.

Tracklist

1.	To be in between, in the moment	5:05

2.	Across the flood	2:48

3.	Here birds come close	3:40

4.	I feel the world is normal	3:16

5.	The destruction and the rebuilding	3:38

6.	You are the same person	3:13

7.	I came with only three things	3:53

8.	Justice (part one)	2:37

9.	Justice (part two)	5:08

Credits

released October 16, 2024

Music and artistic research by Nour Sokhon, 2018–2024. Recording, editing, and mixing by Rabih Beaini at Morphine Raum, Berlin. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk. Cover artwork and typographic design by Farah Fayyad. Photography by Nour Sokhon. Label coordination by Luke Cohlen. Pressed and printed at Monotype Pressing.

"I would like to extend my gratitude to Tania Kammoun for contributing a field recording used on the album; Gabriel Haddad for providing visuals for my live show; Omar Adel for his work on studio video documentation and production; and most importantly, the interviewees who shared their voices and stories: Mahmoud Dabdoub, Asmabug, Kareen Nahas, and Anonymous." – Nour

aural conduct, 2024. This album was published with the support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC. Residency and financial support by LABgamerz in partnership with GMEM.

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