Jad Atoui

This is proving to be a remarkable year for Lebanese experimental music. Between recent releases by Charbel Haber, Dog Plug, Sandy Chamoun, the collaborative albums of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, and the LAND 2 and LAND 3 fundraising compilations, the country’s electroacoustic scene continues to produce some of its most compelling work. Jad Atoui‘s It Will Take Forever is to be counted among its strongest statements in an already exceptionally strong lineup. Atoui approaches composition as the gradual shaping of matter. Rather than relying on melody or harmonic progression, he constructs each piece from evolving masses of resonance, metallic friction, unstable drones and microscopic spectral movement. The album possesses an expansive dynamic range, moving between quieter moments and dense accumulations of sound without resorting to dramatic gestures. Slow transformation allows each texture to reveal its internal life over time. The opening “Pressure Dream” begins in an abrasive mode. Starting with sustained circuitry and low-frequency pressure, the piece gradually unfolds into a breathing drone animated by minute harmonic fluctuations. What initially appears static is, in fact, constantly changing beneath the surface. “Haptic Drift” [a gradual warping of sensory perception] redirects attention towards tactility, roughening the drone with scraping textures and subtle perturbations that make listening more physical. “Purge” marks the album’s only overtly confrontational rupture. Incorporating fragments that resemble excerpts from a historical propaganda broadcast, it introduces an intense psychological moment into a profoundly corporeal soundscape. From there, “Reaching Heart” offers a more introspective counterpart, allowing resonance and fragile harmonic relationships to emerge. The final pair of tracks gradually shifts the perspective outwards. “Blue Moon Red Cloud” unfolds through successive sonic episodes rather than continuous accumulation. It also feels more spacious, recalling the atmospheric phenomena suggested by its title, where subtle changes in spectral balance continually alter the listener’s perception. The closing “Weather of Collapse” brings together many of the album’s central concerns. Subtle harmonic shifts animate the opening drone before the piece slowly accumulates density, reaching an extraordinary plateau where metallic resonances, granular textures and low-frequency pressure coexist within a single unstable sound mass. Even at its most saturated, Atoui remains restrained, allowing the music to dissipate naturally into a luminous, almost forgiving, even blissful conclusion. The cover artwork mirrors this compositional approach. Thick painterly gestures, and translucent washes overlap without resolving into stable figures. Landscapes and geological forms and even faces seem perpetually on the verge of appearing before dissolving back into abstraction, much as the music continually oscillates between recognisable sonic objects and pure texture. Both image and sound privilege accumulation over contrast, inviting the listener and viewer to inhabit states of continual transformation rather than fixed meanings. To find out more about the making of the album and its context we have reached out to Jad Atoui. Ziad Nawfal from Ruptured Records and Hatem Imam have added their own voices to single questions. Your recent work has often explored the hidden sonic lives of objects and spaces, whether through the resonant vessels and acoustic feedback systems of Vibrant Pools or the modified hard drives of Ghost Sectors. It Will Take Forever feels different: rather than focusing on the agency of objects, it seems to centre on bodily pressure, exhaustion, endurance and emotional states. What shifted in your thinking between those projects and this album, and do you see It Will Take Forever as marking a new phase in your practice? JA: I think they come from different practices I’m interested in, but they’re closely related. Vibrant Pools and Ghost Sectors grew out of my interest in installation work and electroacoustic composition. In those projects, I was interested in revealing the hidden sonic potential of objects, treating them almost like spaces that could resonate and saturate under pressure. As feedback and certain frequencies build up, those objects stop behaving like fixed things and become environments in themselves. It Will Take Forever, on the other hand, comes purely from music composition. The focus shifts more toward the body and emotional states, but the underlying thinking isn’t so different. I’m still interested in resonance and saturation, only now the “object” is often the listening body or the architectural space of a venue or club. A club has its own acoustic behaviour. As low frequencies, distortion, and feedback accumulate, the room begins to shape the sound, and the sound, in turn, reshapes the way we experience that space physically and emotionally. So I don’t really see it as a break with my previous work. It feels more like an extension of the same questions, only approached through a different medium. Instead of asking what hidden sounds exist inside objects, I’m asking what happens to us, and to the spaces we inhabit, when sound reaches a certain point of intensity. The album draws on your early relationship with rave culture and club sound, yet rhythm here has been stretched, dismantled and almost entirely dissolved into vast walls of electronics, distortion and low-end pressure. Tracks such as “Pressure Dream” and “Weather of Collapse” retain a powerful sense of physical immersion, but “Purge” feels particularly intriguing because beneath the saturation and noise there appear to be traces of field recordings or excerpts from a film, introducing a political or documentary subtext that is never fully revealed. What role do these partially obscured sounds play within the piece, and are they intended to function as memories, ghosts, or fragments of reality resisting complete abstraction? More broadly, what remains of the rave experience once the beat disappears? JA: Those fragments come from a very different time in my life. Most of the field recordings and film excerpts in “Purge” were collected around 2009, when I was making much more rhythmic, rave-oriented music. I kept them archived for years, and this album felt like the right moment to bring some of them back. What interests me isn’t really their content or what’s being said. It’s the context they carry. They hold memories of that period, the places I was in, the people around me, and the images that have stayed with me ever since. For me, they’re closer memories than documentary material. As for what remains of the rave experience once the beat disappears, I think it’s everything that existed around the beat: the physicality, the pressure, the feeling of losing your sense of time, the collective immersion, and the emotional release. Much of your work has involved collaboration—whether with Anthony Sahyoun, Sandy Chamoun, Sharif Sehnaoui, Kinematik, or through encounters with figures such as Pauline Oliveros, John Zorn and Tarek Atoui. It Will Take Forever, by contrast, feels intensely solitary despite emerging from live performance contexts. Did working alone on this material change your relationship to improvisation and listening, particularly during a period you describe as one of instability and suspended time? JA: I don’t usually separate my solo practice from collaboration because they’re deeply connected. I’ve always spent a lot of time alone with my instrument, practicing improvisation and trying to become more fluent with it. Whether I’m preparing for a solo performance or playing with others, the goal is the same: to make the instrument respond as naturally and immediately as possible. With the modular system, I spend a lot of time designing patches that are as improvisation-friendly as possible. I want the ideas in my mind to translate into sound almost instantly. I’m constantly trying to break the barrier that electronic instruments can impose, where you end up thinking more about the technology than the music. Instead, I want to treat the modular like an acoustic instrument, where listening, gesture, and response happen almost simultaneously, allowing intuition to guide the performance. The pieces on It Will Take Forever developed from those kinds of patches. I would improvise with them, record many live takes, and then choose the ones where everything aligned in a way that felt right. So although the record feels solitary, it’s still rooted in the same improvisational practice. The listening remains the same, only the conversation shifts from being between musicians to being between myself, the instrument, and the space I’m playing in. Beirut appears throughout your work not necessarily as a subject but as a condition: a place of constant adaptation, uncertainty and transformation. The album’s title itself suggests an almost unbearable temporality. How much did the realities of living and working in Beirut between 2023 and 2025 shape the emotional and sonic architecture of these pieces? JA: Living in Beirut inevitably shapes the way I make music, but I don’t think of the city as something I’m trying to represent. It’s more like a condition that quietly enters the work. The uncertainty, constant adaptation, and the feeling that time can suddenly stretch or collapse all influence how I listen and compose. It Will Take Forever came from that feeling. During 2023 to 2025, there were long periods where life felt suspended, and the music naturally absorbed that state. Beyond your own music, you’ve been deeply involved in Beirut’s experimental ecosystem through collaborations, venues, festivals such as Irtijal, and the wider network of artists, engineers and labels surrounding figures like Fadi Tabbal, Tunefork, Ruptured and Annihaya. How do you see the current state of this ecosystem? And with It Will Take Forever arriving at a moment when Lebanese experimental music is receiving increasing international attention, what role do labels, community spaces and long-term artistic relationships play in sustaining this scene especially considering some of its key representatives are now based abroad? JA: I don’t really see It Will Take Forever as belonging to a specific scene. It’s a very personal record that comes from years of performing, listening, and experimenting. While Beirut has shaped me deeply, the album is equally connected to my years in New York and places I’ve performed in. That’s where I first became immersed in modular synthesis, and musician friends introduced me to that world, both technically and through collaboration. Those experiences completely changed the way I thought about electronic instruments, improvisation, and sound. What has always made Beirut’s experimental music ecosystem special is its richness. There has never been a single sound defining it. Even when many artists move abroad, relationships continue. People keep collaborating and organizing concerts across different cities. I think that’s what keeps the scene alive. It’s less about geography than about the people and the relationships that continue to grow over time. Ziad Nawfal (Ruptured Records): To be honest, what sustains Beirut’s experimental music ecosystem is not any one label, venue, festival, or studio. It is the relationships between people. Over the years, artists, engineers, organizers, and labels have supported one another in different ways, often under difficult circumstances. That support has taken many forms: putting on concerts, sharing equipment, offering studio time, releasing records, introducing people to one another, or simply being present over the long term. At Ruptured, we’ve always seen ourselves as one small part of a much larger network that includes festivals such as Irtijal, studios such as Tunefork, independent spaces, and many individuals working behind the scenes. None of these exist in isolation, and the work would not be possible without that ongoing exchange. It is true that many of the people who helped shape this community now live outside Lebanon (case in point, I do), but that hasn’t necessarily weakened the connections. The collaborations continue, ideas keep circulating, and new projects keep emerging. In some ways, the community has become more dispersed geographically while remaining closely connected through shared histories and long-standing relationships. Jad’s album is a good example of that. It comes from a very personal place, but it also reflects years of conversations, collaborations, and mutual support between people who have been making work together for a long time. The album artwork by Hatem Imam feels like a natural extension of the music: abstract yet tactile, suspended between turbulence and stillness, with a rich, layered colour palette that seems to evoke both erosion and accumulation. Given your long-standing connections to Beirut’s artistic community and Hatem’s own practice—where dreams, memory, desire and abstraction often intersect—how did this collaboration come about? Were there specific conversations between the two of you about the themes of It Will Take Forever, and what do you feel the artwork reveals about the album that the music alone perhaps does not? JA: I’ve admired Hatem’s work for a long time. The way he uses colour has always reminded me of sound composition, and his approach to abstraction feels close to the way I think about sound. Both are built through layers that gradually merge into a single atmosphere. His work has also been part of my visual memory since I first discovered Beirut’s experimental scene. I grew up seeing it on concert posters, album covers, and festival identities. I sent him the album, and we briefly spoke about the colours I associated with it, and that was all. When I imagined It Will Take Forever, I kept thinking about a cloudy landscape built through layers of colour rather than clear forms. When Hatem shared the artwork, it immediately felt right. It inhabits the same emotional space, and for me, that’s the most meaningful kind of collaboration. Hatem Imam: After listening to the album a couple of times, Jad and I met and talked abstractly about visual directions and color combinations. I used monotype and my practice is process based so I don’t have a clear idea about the final result when I start. What I wanted was to capture Jad’s sonic space which is simultaneously monumental and intricate. I started with rich dark colors and then added light areas through subtraction. (Gianmarco Del Re)