Intersection

Where do you even begin to start with the situation in the Middle East? So many artists have tried to o?er hope, and that’s what this Norway-based project led by Lebanese visual artist and singer Tania Saleh – a woman who was in the vanguard of her nation’s indie music scene back in the 1990s – tries to do. And she does a decent job.

is album is part of a wider audio-visual project, using music to complement more than a dozen murals she painted on streets across the Middle East, each speedily executed in the vein of gra¤ti artists such as Banksy. On Intersection, Saleh has set the words of the region’s finest poets of the past century to music. A?er all, they had lived these troubles and given voice to them. As a result, we have poetry from the likes of Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwish, Syria’s Nizar Qabbani and Iraq’s Nazik Al-Malaika. A poem by Lebanese great Khalil Gibran, ‘No Justice in the Forests’, talks of the world as a jungle. It is an appropriate metaphor for this album, produced with Tunisian Khalil Judran who brings some heavy electronic beats to bear on the delicate Arabic s?lings. While the earlier tracks feel swamped by the industrial beats, the music eventually opens up and the project finds that elusive sense of peace.