Ziad Nawfal Mix for Stegi Radio // 01 October 2024

November 1, 2024January 8, 2025Music ShowsLeave a Comment

A monthly selection of alternative, ambient and experimental music from Lebanon and the MENA region, selected by music promoter and label owner Ziad Nawfal. Originally commissioned by Stegi Radio and produced by Onassis Stegi.

1. Marmalsana [Burkhard Beins, Tony Elieh & Maurice Louca] – Inundo

2. Youmna Saba – Akaleel

3. Yara Asmar – Are These Your Hands? Would You Like Them Back? (With Majd Chidiac)

4. Marmalsana [Burkhard Beins, Tony Elieh & Maurice Louca] – Alveno

5. Elyse Tabet [with Pascal Semerdjian & Yara Asmar] – Bright Bells (Bana Haffar Remix)

6. Liliane Chlela – Bza2

7. Safa – Grounds

8. Nstant [Stephanie Merchak & Nour Sokhon] – Floating Like Particles In The Air

9. Sote – Kangaroo Court

10. Anthony Sahyoun – Khifat Al-Atraf (with Firas al Hallak)

11. Munma – Le garde du coeur

12. Mazen El Sayed & Jawad Nawfal – Pastless

13. Shatr Collective – Kafas

Press Review // Marmalsana [Burkhard Beins, Tony Elieh, Maurice Louca] // Marmalsana

October 9, 2024November 18, 2024Press ArchiveLeave a Comment

Acclaim for Marmalsana’s album Marmalsana, released by Ruptured in July 2024 (cassette/digital):

“A singularly idiomatic music worth attending to.” – Peter Hollo, Utility Fog broadcast (FBi Radio), July 2024
https://utilityfog.radio/archives/2024/07/

“The tracks are plucked, rattled and thrummed exercises in nuanced rhythmic and textural exploration. The juxtapositions and tensions between melodic and non-idiomatic are entrancing, peaking on ‘Alveno’, when Louca plays out a jaunty, almost folky melody on the quarter tone guitar which the other two make a throbbing, creaking soundscape around. The whole album arcs like a storm rising and falling, with all the shifting pressure and unpredictable eddies of movement and sound that suggests.” – Daryl Worthington, The Quietus, September 2024
https://thequietus.com/quietus-reviews/cassettes/spools-out-cassette-reviews-for-september-by-daryl-worthington/

“It’s a wonderful album that suggests how those reduced materials can be shepherded into something truly dynamic and exciting, all of it fueled by an obvious rapport and shared vision. Maurice Louca and Tony Elieh work together in multiple projects, including the great Arabic rock band Karkana, while Burkhard Beins and Elieh also have a duo called Zone Null, so the overlapping interests are nothing new. Still, intersecting ideas don’t ever guarantee something this cohesive and absorbing.” – Peter Margasak, Nowhere Street substack, September 2024
https://petermargasak.substack.com/p/on-the-road-again

Featured in The Attic’s Staff Picks of July 2024:
https://theatticmag.com/news/2464/staff-picks-_-july-2024.html

Listen/Order

Ruptured Album Release // MARMALSANA [Maurice Louca, Tony Elieh, Burkhard Beins]

July 26, 2024November 18, 2024NewsLeave a Comment

Releasing July 19th, 2024 on Ruptured Records:

MARMALSANA is a Berlin-based trio that brings together Burkhard Beins on percussion, Tony Elieh on acoustic bass guitar, and Maurice Louca on (acoustic quarter-tone guitar. An outstanding melding of free improv and experimental jazz, if you will.

Based in Berlin and active in the free improv and experimental scenes of the city, Beins, Elieh, and Louca have spent the last decade or so developing various projects with local and international musicians.

Marmalsana is their first collaboration, one for which they decided to forego amplification and rely on acoustic instruments only, employing extended techniques and objects to produce soundscapes of drones, textures, melodies, and polyrhythms.

The album fuses the three musicians’ backgrounds, styles, and influences: they succeed in merging their individual contributions into a unified whole, moving between distinct placements of sound and moments beyond instrumental recognizability. Their journey traverses between Beirut, Berlin, and Cairo, creating in the process a nomadic musical language.

The music on Marmalsana was composed, performed and produced in Berlin in December 2023.
Mixed by Burkhard Beins, mastered by Werner Dafeldecker.

Cover photography by Tony Elieh, design by Maya Chami.

The album is currently streaming on all digital platforms.
It is also available as a limited edition of 60 cassettes, shipping exclusively from Ruptured’s Bandcamp page.

Listen/Order here

Al Maslakh Album Release // SAWT OUT // Black Current

June 14, 2023September 17, 2023NewsLeave a Comment

Releasing 28 June 2023 on Al Maslakh:

Since its foundation in 2015, Berlin-based trio SAWT OUT has shaped and refined its profile as a prominent improvisational unit. With their unusual acoustic instrumentation of trumpet and two sets of percussion, the three artists create bewildering sound-worlds rich in detail and musical interaction.

“Black Current” is their second studio album, and features a different approach than its predecessor from 2019. While the latter was more representative of the sudden changes and machine-like precision heard in the group’s live performances, individual ideas emerge at a slower pace on this new album, and musical material rather flows in currents through the group, often blurring its instrumental origins, while shifting and transforming from one player to another. Nevertheless there’s an extraordinary tightness to the group’s interplay throughout the four tracks, sometimes giving the impression of one collective brain being distributed among three musicians, where each slight change of a musical element directly affects all the others.

Sawt Out:
Burkhard Beins – percussion
Mazen Kerbaj – trumpet
Michael Vorfeld – percussion

All music by Beins / Kerbaj / Vorfeld
Recorded by Sawt Out at ausland, Berlin on 2, 3 and 4 July 2020.
Mixed by Burkhard Beins. Mastered by Werner Dafeldecker.
Artwork & design by Mazen Kerbaj.

Available as a digital album and limited edition vinyl LP with download code.