Ghadr

The trio of singer Sandy Chamoun and electronic music creators Anthony Sahyoun and Jad Atoui have produced an album that is anything but comfortable listening. Tracks on Ghadr begin with electronic swirls and blips, introducing Sandy Chamoun’s pure voice, before a tide of concrete sound rises up to overwhelm everything else. Perhaps more discomfiting still are the percussive pulses, which never settle into a regular rhythm. In 30 minutes of running time, the only small respite in the album comes with the gentler electronic eddies of ‘Al Moulatham’, which keep the wall of noise at bay for a while, exposing a lingering sadness in the vocals. This album was recorded in Beirut in the autumn of 2024. It carries no explicit political statement, but it is not difficult to hear the sounds of anger and incomprehension from the three musicians as the impenetrable electronic noise repeatedly washes in to drown out everything else in a tide of distortion.