Mayssa Jallad will perform a series of April dates across Scandinavia and the Netherlands, accompanied by Julia Sabra (Snakeskin, Postcards) and Pascal Semerdjian (Postcards, SANAM).
These concerts include solo presentations of Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels, as well as two appearances at Rewire — including a special collaboration set with Swedish producer Civilistjävel!, expanding on their work together on Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels – Versions.
Mayssa Jallad will appear at Rewire Festival (The Hague) in April 2026 for two separate performances.
On 10 April, she presents Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels as a trio with Julia Sabra and Pascal Semerdjian, performing the work in its full live arrangement.
On 12 April, she returns for a second appearance with Swedish producer Civilistjävel!, following his contribution to Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels – Versions. This set extends the dialogue they began on the remix album, opening another window into the project’s sonic world.
Mayssa Jallad’s live set from Trans Musicales 2024 is now up on KEXP.
Recorded at L’Antipode on December 04, 2024, during the Trans Musicales de Rennes festival, the set features several excerpts from Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels.
With Julia Sabra (guitar, synth) and Pascal Semerdjian (drums), Mayssa delivers a striking performance, tracing key sites of the Lebanese Civil War and the ways physical spaces hold historical memory.
Watch the full set on KEXP at the link below.
Mayssa’s album Marjaa: The Battle Of The Hotels, released by Ruptured and Six of Swords in March 2023, is still available on both labels’ Bandcamp pages.
Mayssa Jallad has announced a handful of French dates in support of her album Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (#41 in The Wire’s Albums of the Year 2023). She will be accompanied on stage by Julia Sabra (Postcards, Snakeskin) and Pascal Semerdjian (Postcards, SANAM, Préfaces).
Ziad Nawfal’s monthly broadcast for Radio Alhara in Bethlehem, Palestine — playing Lebanese musician & producer Fadi Tabbal’s latest album in full, along with a selection of some of his recent production work.
Track List:
FADI TABBAL — I RECOGNIZE YOU FROM MY SKETCHES
1. (keep beating)
2. Absence or death
3. Oh Heart!
4. Oh heart, are you burning
5. All those nights
6. You were right
7. (keep pumping)
8. When we swam together
9. (keep thumping)
10. I am all that is left
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11. Snakeskin (Julia Sabra & Fadi Tabbal) – Snakeskin
12. Elyse Tabet – Sequel / live to tell (with Nadine Makarem)
13. Charbel Haber & Fadi Tabbal – La certitude de l’aube
14. Charbel Haber, Joseph Ghosn, Fadi Tabbal – In A Technicolor Dream, You and I Were Floating in The Caspian Sea
15. Mayssa Jallad – Holiday Inn March 21 to 29
16. Postcards – Coins (with Sary Moussa)
A monthly selection of alternative, ambient and experimental music from Lebanon and the MENA region, selected by music promoter and label owner Ziad Nawfal – this broadcast features a guest mix by Lebanesemusician MAYSSA JALLAD. Originally commissioned by Stegi Radio and produced by Onassis Stegi.
Mayssa Jallad is a Beirut-based bilingual singer-songwriter, architectural researcher and teacher, born in 1990. Her work deals with the highly personal as well as the political, as with her first solo album “Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels”, which explores the histories of urban battles that occurred before she was born, during the Lebanese Civil War, through a collaborative musical and architectural lens.
DAKN & MUQATA’A Fi Mi’ad
SNAKESKIN All The Birds
MITSKI Heaven
YOUMNA SABA Ahad
FARAH KADDOUR Estehlāl
VAMPI & NADAH EL-SHAZLY Myst
RAHILL Tell Me
DRAGONCHILD Unicode 1200
MARC CODSI The Dance
DEENA ABDELWAHED Each Day
JENNY HVAL Year Of Love
SARY MOUSSA & CHARBEL HABER An Atom Of Your Love
NABIHAH IQBAL Dreamer
SANAM Shajar Al-Touti
CLAIRE DEAK Quarrel Of The Senses
MAYSSA JALLAD Haigazian (October 22)
Portrait of Mayssa taken in Beirut by Mohamad Al-Rifai
Following the release of her critically-acclaimed debut LP Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels in March 2023, Lebanese artist Mayssa Jallad returns with a set of EU/UK tour dates (including shows in London, Berlin and Brussels), as well as a stunning new video directed by Lebanese filmmaker Ely Dagher.
You can watch the video below and read Mayssa’s notes on the historical/geopolitical context.
Apr 21 – Donau Festival, Krems, AT – tickets Apr 24 – Hotel Olympik, Prague, CZ Apr 26 – Sharpe Festival, Bratislava, SK – tickets Apr 27 – Silent Green, Berlin, DE – tickets May 1 – UCL, London, UK (workshop) May 2 – Folklore Hoxton, London, UK – tickets May 3 – Les Aralunaires, Arlon, BE – tickets May 4 – Les Nuits Botanique, Brussels, BE – tickets
WATCH the video for “Holiday Inn (January to March)”
Directed by Ely Dagher, the video for Mayssa’s album track “Holiday Inn (January to March)” is a visually stunning work exploring the album’s theme of memory and decay. Archival images of a war-torn Beirut early in Lebanon’s Civil War are digitally processed into a series of fractured 3D models, through which we are slowly navigated. The results are eerily haunting, and resonate powerfully with current events.
According to Dagher, “I was looking for a visual language that could express the fragility and complexity of an elusive and broken memory – something fragmented and incomplete. Archive footage from the battles were given a new life and perspective to craft a collage that blends details from the vivid realism of the battles with the fluid capacity of memory. Bodies, buildings, feelings and violence fragmented.”
Mayssa writes that “Holiday Inn is an immense modernist high rise hotel with a revolving rooftop restaurant, overlooking the Mediterranean… It was inaugurated in 1974, a few months before the beginning of the battle of the hotels, in which it was a main protagonist, first invaded by the blues (right wing nationalists) and then the reds (left wing pro Palestinians). For 5 months, with 5 star hotel amenities, blue gunmen terrorized and controlled the city. During this period, two massacres occurred: on January 18, in Karantina, the blues killed 1,500 Muslims and Palestinians. On January 20th, in Damour, the reds killed 1,500 Christians. Spiraling into endless violence and retaliation.
The phenomenon of high rises in Beirut, these weapons of war that created the perfect conditions for urban warfare, is an often overlooked effect of the 1948 Nakba, when Israeli Occupying Forces expelled Palestinians and destabilized the Arab region. Wealthy Palestinians, Syrians and Iraqis invested their money in Lebanon to avoid the brunt of political and economic crises in their home countries. In parallel, Gulf countries that had struck oil around that period, also started investing in Beirut . A “Golden Era” of grandiose projects for the 1% was born, luxury hotels, nightclubs, towers, ignoring the ‘belt of misery’ being formed around the capital. A luxury so vulnerable, so easily destabilized that it was invaded 6 months after the civil war broke out, again, as an effect of the Nakba and the political division since the Palestinian Liberation Organization took post in Lebanon.
Today, these buildings exist as relics of the past, among new skyscrapers that threaten to repeat the same history over and over again. Are we remembering, or are we just reliving the past? We long to forget, and end up falling into the same traps of violence and false prosperity, over and over again.”
A monthly selection of alternative, ambient and experimental music from Lebanon and the MENA region, selected by music promoter and label owner Ziad Nawfal – this broadcast features a guest mix by Lebanese musician JULIA SABRA, from dreampop trio Postcards and ambient duo Snakeskin. This broadcast was commissioned and produced by Onassis Cultural Center, and presented for the first time in the frame of Stegi Radio.
Julia Sabra is a Lebanese musician, songwriter, composer and sound engineer. She co-founded Postcards in 2013, a dream pop/shoegaze trio, and is the band’s lead singer, lyricist, co-composer and multi-instrumentalist. Postcards have released two EPs and four albums and their fifth is set for release in the fall of 2024. The trio has been regularly touring Europe and the Middle East since 2015.
Sabra is one half of Snakeskin, an ambient/electronic duo with long-time collaborator Fadi Tabbal. They released their debut self-titled album in October 2022. She is also the manager of Tunefork Studios since 2017, where she works as composer, VO artist and live sound engineer.
Charbel Haber & Fadi Tabbal- Enfin La Nuit
Postcards- Fall From Grace (unreleased)
Marc Codsi – The Wait
Interbellum – Flotsam
Mayssa Jallad – Kharita
Marwan Tohme – To Begin Again (unreleased)
Yara Asmar – Come Back Later
Fadi Tabbal – You Were Right (unreleased)
Anthony Sahyoun – Untitled (unreleased)
Snakeskin – In Our Garden
Farah Kaddour – Khuzama (unreleased)
Youmna Saba – Akaleel
Charif Megarbane – Souk el Ahad
Sary Moussa & Charbel Haber – An Atom of Your Love
Ruptured Music 