An introductory text to the Online Special «Norient City Sounds: Beirut». Special curator and writer Rayya Badran asks: what are the sounds of the aftermath of a collapse?
PlaylistTen music videos that can give you a sense of the breadth of musical genres coming from Beirut, Lebanon and the diaspora today. The selection focuses on productions made from 2020 to 2022, all of which explore personal or political matters.
Short EssayWhat can we learn from a film by listening to it? Rana Eid’s «Panoptic» (2019) takes the viewer on a dark peregrination in the city of Beirut, and becomes a terrain on which images, sounds and voices superimpose and coalesce, as if to mirror the complexities and rhythms of the city itself.