With four main notes only, the legendary video game Prince of Persia (Jordan Mechner, 1989) tries to build a soundscape that illustrates a mysterious and timeless «Orient». This simple midi melody is a very distinct example of Orientalism in music and it is an echo of childhood for Tunisian designer and composer Rehab Hazgui. For the soundtrack of the virtual exhibition «DisOrient: Welcome to the Hall of Mirrors», which is part of the German festival Mannheimer Sommer, she took the Orientalist motive and turned it on its head to create a spooky deconstruction of a stereotyped musical universe.

This is how the artist introduces her piece: «‹Unheimliche Heimat› is a synthscape that emerges from the psyche of Prince of Persia’s protagonist in the video game from 1989. The synthscape transforms a fragment of the original theme into a floating loop. As repetitions pile up, the ‹signification› breaks down and what was familiar becomes strange and uncommon through a process of de-familiarization. One is driven by percolating sounds that signal in and out and lead to a place where self-modulating bleeps course in as if they would be part of the scenery, only to be washed away again by a compulsive loop.»