In the Core of the City, at the Exact Midpoint of the Night

Poetic Text

Sounds are remembered, evoked, and dreamed of in this short text by Carine Doumit that oscillates between the bombastic sonic violence of the city of Beirut, Lebanon, the weary whispers of its protagonists, and the relentless sounds that occupy daily life. Taking inspiration from a forthcoming film, it reads like a feverish dream or poem in which the sounds of the city rise and fade.

April 4. Langebåt, Norway. I sit on a rock facing the spruce trees circling the narrow steep sides of the fjord. A bird’s conversation – a quarrel? – the waves seem to have fallen silent to make space for it. The dispute slowly dissolves into the air, toward the ocean, then grows closer. Two white geese stand in silence on the wooden deck. Are they lending an ear to the quarrel too? It is so rare to find yourself face to face with a single sound, isolated and clear, imposing its unequivocal presence. For the first time in a long time, the roaring echoes of Beirut have faded.

June 1. Beirut again. Deprived of lights at night, the city has become a «dark» city. Words sometimes just mean what they mean. This absolute night terrifies me. I could write a story about a woman, «She Who is Afraid of the Night». She would have recurring visions of others, aimlessly wandering in the gloomy streets, lost. Then they would find each other, meeting in the core of the city, at the exact midpoint of the night, when all things are possible. But how would I write this story if I do not dare to face the night and meet the others?

June 15. Tonight, a gigantic red moon will rise, announcing the summer heatwaves, they say. They call it the strawberry supermoon. A lingering sound seeps in my mind. At moments, it resembles a long and desperate cry. At others, it is a jubilant call for arms. The night – or is it the moon? – is calling on me to meet her. I can no longer hide.

June 16. It is now past midnight. It is the same night that started hours ago, yet it is different, altered by a thin reddish halo. A figure emerges in the alleyway, as if coming from another world. She does not walk, she glides. All dressed in black, she blends with other shadows, then suddenly reappears behind me. «Don’t be startled», she whispers. A sound recorder is rolled up like a snake or a protruding limb around her neck, her waist, and her arms. «I have gone hunting for sounds in the daytime», she tells me. «Beirut is shapeless, an unfathomable conglomerate. As for the sounds:

Electrical Saturation
A sonic violence:
Thresholds, very fast transients,
swerves, vigilant ear
In the heat, a vertigo

Hyperacoustic or deaf city or both at the same time
The sound of the impact of bullets on an engraved wall
And the brilliance of the silver blue.»

She speaks in chopped up sentences. I ask: «What is the silver blue?»
«The sea», she says, «the one we can’t hear, but is omnipresent.»
*«And what about the sounds at night?» I ask.
«The nights are different. Everything is suspended. Sounds are but echoes. Sometimes you can trace their origin, hoping it would lead you to unforeseen junctions of time and space.»

«Come», she says, and I follow her. The streets are empty. «Can you hear the roaring vibrations from under that bridge? Where are we exactly?», she asks, «and what are these voices that I hear?»

August 10. Under the bridge, the notorious Ring, a setup for a movie: lights, a camera and a slender curly-haired woman looking into the viewfinder. After a long moment, she calls out: «Floy, you can come out now.»

The graceful figure slowly emerges from the shadows, as if coming from another world. This night seems to be a continuation of the night when we met. There has been a long suspension in time, yet here we are again, in the presence of one another.

A man suddenly appears behind me. «Don’t be startled», he gently whispers. We observe Floy in silence, as she slides her protruded snaky ear over the rugged walls covered with reiterated calls for revolution. One of them reads: ANOTHER ENDING TO THIS WORLD IS POSSIBLE. The man whispers: «She is recording sounds from the city’s underbelly, voices from the past and the future intertwined.»

The shadow of a large creature looms over the bridge. The man gently calls out and a large German shepherd dog comes out of the shadows. All sounds seem to have been muted now, as the two companions leave the movie set and enter the dark night again, under a gigantic red moon.

This article is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Beirut» curated and edited by Rayya Badran.

trailer «norient city sounds: beirut»

Biography

Carine Doumit (b.1981, France) is an independent film editor and writer based in Beirut. She is part of «The Camelia Committee», a collective that explores multiple forms of writing and collaborations. She is currently collaborating as co-writer and film editor with filmmaker Mira Adoumier and sound artist, bassist and electro-acoustic composer Floy Krouchi on the feature film «The Night Came About».

Links

Nadim Mishlawi, Rana Eid: «Beirut: Traces of a City – A Pod Poem» (Norient)

Shop

Local Music Scenes and Globalization: Transnational Platforms in Beirut

This book offers the first in-depth study of experimental and popular music in Beirut. 2014 finally out as Paperback and Kindle Edition.

order now

The Arab Avant-Garde: Music, Politics, Modernity

The co-edited book is finally out! Ten articles about new musical positions in the Arab World.

order now

Beirut Adrift

€6.00

A very personal selection of tracks from Beirut, Lebanon, that captures the shifts from sorrow to riotous urges, from surrender to escape, from remembrance to lapses of memory.

purchase

Published on August 25, 2022

Last updated on December 18, 2023

Topics

City

Soundscape

All Topics

Specials

Norient City Sounds: Beirut

Snap

print as pdf

First iteration of «Automobile», a sound performance for cars by Joe Namy at Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, 2012 (photo: Joe Namy).

In Defense of Loud Music

Essay

by Joe Namy

Since 2012, artist Joe Namy has performed «Automobile», a variable channel sound performance for cars with super-modified stereo systems, in different cities around the world, starting with Beirut. In this essay, he explains the genesis of this performance and underscores the importance of bass and loud music, and the communities they help create.

«The Ghost of Dub, the ghost of sound systems in particular, that hiss that you’re hearing is connected with the sound from the beginning of the universe, it’s the cosmic microwave background. I think in a very physical scientific sense, what haunts dub, that hiss you hear, is the sound of the beginning of time.» – Eddie George, «Reflections on Dub and the Aesthetics of Noise» (2018)

A declaration of love, a conjuring, a call to dis-order, the low thumps that waft in passing from blocks away, are all of these. Heard before seen but immediately recognizable, distinct sound landmarks pronounce the prowl of the souped-up sound car in its element. These technological marvels of mobile sound are custom hand-built machines capable of producing bass so powerful it can shake the very concrete under your feet. Low frequencies are not just heard with our ears, we also listen with our skin, we listen from the gut. And although the subwoofer is a relatively new invention on the timeline of human sound manipulation, on the clock of the world of bass, sub-frequencies speak directly to our most primitive emotions. There is something fundamentally human about bass. It taps into our subconscious, resonates deep inside us.

Some people listen to music. Some people feel music. Some people feel music with dance, or in meditation, or in several parts of Beirut and Lebanon, through enormous subwoofers in the trunk of their car that pushes air so hard it can rock your core. This air is passion. This passion is bass, and the car is a getaway, a chase, an escape.

First iteration of «Automobile», Beirut 2012 (photo: Joe Namy).

«Escapism has always been an adjective used to describe the dance. That’s an outsider’s view. Solidarity is what it really offers.» – Theo Parrish, Facebook post, 2016, written after the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, USA.

In Beirut, cars line up along the seaside corniche, open their doors, and play music to the sea. Waves spill over distorted synths. Sea-salted shaabi music, techno, and hip hop mixes with shisha smoke and split sunflower seeds.

A ritual for bass:
trunks up,
windows down,
doors open,
volume up.

We performed this ritual on the street in front of Ashkal Alwan for Homeworks in 2012 and 2013. I put together an immersive sound performance entitled «Automobile», collaborating with young men and their cars whom we initially found in their element on the corniche, with the help of research assistant Jessika Khazrik. We selected cars based on their sound-system’s power, style, and passion. The men were invited to Ashkal to take part as performers, letting us use their cars to create a synced-up 11-car-speaker array connected to one controller, playing an 11-channel surround sound composition mixed live. Each system becomes a party on its own, and all together, a cacophonous congregation of bass in unison. In stereo automobiles ignite engines and speakers simultaneously.

The performance begins when the first car arrives and ends when the last car leaves. It’s a site-specific performance I’ve since put on in Mannheim, Gwangju, Toronto, Montreal, Abu Dhabi, and London. Every city has its own unique sound-car style, a rear view reflection of the streets these cars boom. In Canada, DIY bass cabinets are made with heavy wood frames while in Dubai, where timber is less accessible, they use shaped fiberglass curved with slopes of speakers.

The Social Structure of Open Trunks

Although speakers have only been around since the 1930s, and subwoofers since the 1960s, hi-tech bass is ancestral, tuned to resonate our blood. Shortly after speakers were invented, DJs were invented. Different types of music, such as dub and techno, were born from new technology and required new speaker sound designs, systems built to faithfully reproduce these new sounds. In Dahieh, a southern suburb of Beirut, a mechanic named «Ali Bazooka» builds his sound systems to be big, bulky, wires exposed bazookas, slang for powerful automobile speaker systems, designed for throwing amplified synthesizers playing distorted digitized folk songs. For these systems, fidelity is a spectrum, and often, the correlation between the recording quality of a song is inversely related to the emotional content – the grimier the bass the more raw the emotion.

«Roads are the infinity of things.» – Susan Stewart (1974)

On the open road, bass drifts, bass migrates. Music is to architecture, as dance is to music. If you listen to music in a car, the acoustics are indebted to the road, or the sea, or a gas station. In cars, we are somewhere, in music we are somewhere else. What we love about noise is the way we lose ourselves in it. What we love about the road is the way we lose ourselves on it, drifting noise, drifting self. This loss of self is actually a hyper-awareness, moving through feeling. Like any reality-bending experience, it can become addictive. For bass heads, thousands of dollars and countless hours of labor are spent on going lower and louder. An irrational economy of amplified expression. When you hear these systems on the street, the bass womps are actually a public display of affection and obsession. It’s an obsession that almost only afflicts young men.

Instagram story, posted by Jana Saleh (photo: Instagram).

«I am with you in the spirit of the Music whose resonance I would like to direct against the law.» – Fred Moten (1994, 51)

The young man leans on his sound car, the young man is transparent, the bass passes through him and obscures our view, we can only see the bass. The young man is invisible, to society, to politics, to be heard is to be seen, and bass is a voice, bass is our voice.

Much of what sound laws label as nuisance is how people audibly mark public space as «theirs». To some, these mobile sound systems are considered anti-social, uncivil, but to many of us, these are the sounds of life and community. They bring us together, providing a kind of public service, which announces cultural references, anthems, rhythms, voices that reinforce our sense of belonging to each other, and ultimately, to the sound of the beginning of the universe.

Because of this, sound cars served a deeper purpose during the protests of 2019. The different sound-systems that sprung up during the early days of the October 17 uprising played an essential role in the strategic cacophony. I counted at least 11 different sound-systems sprawled across Martyrs’ Square. Most of the sound-systems in the protest squares were literally a pile of speakers tied to the top of a van, fundamentally different from more conventional sound cars, but they all serve the same bass god. These systems played music, amplified speeches, and energized the crowd with call and response chants. Some had full-blown concerts with MCs balancing atop the speaker mounds, some recited poetry, and interspersed between the various systems were people with drums and megaphones, tear gas and burnt tires. More conventional sound cars also made an appearance, each sounding out wherever they could fit in. This is the roll of the ride, the sound car carves out space, claims the air and raises the vibration of the street.

From the October 17 protests 2019 (photo: Joe Namy).

List of References

George, Eddie. 2018. «Reflections on Dub and the Aesthetics of Noise». SoundCloud. Podcast recorded as a part of «The Poetics of Dub» session, on Saturday January 13, 2018, Goldsmiths College, London. (https://soundcloud.com/dubmorphology/reflections-on-dub-and-the-aesthetics-of-noise).

Moten, Fred. 1994. «Music Against the Law of Reading the Future and ‹Rodney King›». The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 27 (1): 51–64. (https://doi.org/10.2307/1315058).

Stewart, Susan. 1974. «Roads». Poetry 1974 (09): 314–15.

This article is part of the virtual exhibition «Norient City Sounds: Beirut» curated and edited by Rayya Badran.

trailer «norient city sounds: beirut»