Beirut Birds

On stage, Nour Sokhon spins a luggage wheel at various speeds. Bureaucratic paperwork is waved and shuffled. The sounds of their movement are what Sokhon is after. They are looped, manipulated, and played over a three-year sound archive of field recordings from Germany and Lebanon, and interviewees speaking about the recent wave of migration from Lebanon, not just those that managed to leave, but also those that couldn't and those that chose not to. The live rendition of Beirut Birds stages an interplay of tension between a body’s decision to move across oceans and the objects that carry and bar such possibilities. 

This tension is used to sculpt the non-linear time of migration, with an emphasis on how time is felt and not administered. Over the soundscape, Sokhon adds her own voice, repeating short phrases. A new method within her oeuvre, these phrases act less as mantras and more as images layered on top of one another, lingering and resurfacing when the time is right. Sokhon opens with the phrase, ‘To be in between / to be in the moment’. While viewers may initially associate this line with the literal passage of migration, the performance gradually reveals another register, describing what remains lodged in the body after migrating: not the failure to belong to a place but an attachment to the durational condition of holding multiple juxtaposing feelings of home.

The live performance searches for these emotional registers across genres, each track seamlessly feeding off of the last, but always taking new directions. They build on each other to reach an orchestra, not of instruments but of stories on the move. As viewers, we feel how one track informs the other through the power of Sokhon’s slicing and combining of the different voices she has interviewed. They are separate experiences, yet they seem to lean on each other when they are summoned in the performance. Sokhon also utters their words live to feed back into the chorus, which she describes as a way of preserving dialogue in the archives, to keep it alive and to bridge time and distance every time she takes to the stage. 

The videoscape by Gabriel Haddad that accompanies the performance is the only element that provides a sense of orientation: facing up to the sky, and the birds, then down at us. The video lights up the stage, Sokhon, her objects that turn into instruments, and her performance. This juxtaposition is fitting. If this album were a conversation between those who moved away and those who stayed put, it would unfold while looking towards the sky, tracing the birds, and watching the horizon. It is from this vantage point that the scale of our feelings, and the scale of what we have been witnessing over these years, comes into focus.

– Nadim Choufi

Credits: 

Music and artistic research by Nour Sokhon (2018–24). 
Album recorded, edited, and mixed by Rabih Beaini at Morphine Raum, Berlin. 
Mastered by Rashad Becker at Clunk. 
Cover artwork and typographic design by Farah Fayyad. 
Photography by Nour Sokhon. Label coordination by Luke Cohlen. 
Pressed and printed at Monotype Pressing.

The documented live performance took place at Petit Plateau, Friche la Belle de Mai, Marseille, presented as part of the Modulation Series (2025). Video documentation by Mia Gadenne. Live performance sound recording by Tito Loria. Live performance mixing and mastering by Nour Sokhon. The event was organised by LABgamerz and GMEM. 

Nour Sokhon extends her gratitude to Tania Kammoun for contributing a field recording used on the album; Gabriel Haddad for providing live visuals; and most importantly, the interviewees who shared their voices and stories: Mahmoud Dabdoub, Asmabug, Kareen Nahas, and Anonymous.

Released on aural conduct (2024). This album was published with the support of the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC. Residency and financial support by LABgamerz in partnership with GMEM.