It Will Take Forever moves through emotions in swells, as if pulling us through feelings. Composed and played live on modular synths from 2023 to 2025 in Beirut, Jad Atoui’s work almost sings grief through those electronics, in a world being ripped apart. Behind it, club-sized sub-bass impact rumbles like our own bodies. There’s now a video by Ralf Moussa, as well.
I’ve written about and played Jad’s music before. He’s featured in this month’s issue of The Wire (September) in an extended four-page write-up. Amid attempted erasure, Lebanon’s music scene is finally getting some attention from larger outlets, without those outlets always needing “MENA” or something appended, as if it were an asterisk. But it’s worth highlighting here on CDM, too.
Patience has been on my mind. (It helped that I got an extra sign in the form of an LFO.) For all the nervous, crackling rhythms, this album unfolds deliberately, thoroughly. It’s a meditation, the kind where you let unstable thoughts spill out of your head.
And now the video with Ralf Moussa produces a kind of abstract score, a way of reinterpreting the musical material on a timebase. Pieces are fragmented at different speeds, as if the shards of memory can be held in place even as they’re being violently broken apart. (They even describe “shuffling a deck of cards” in the text. It’s a modern Odyssey… or perhaps Iliad.)
From Ruptured:
The video brings Jad’s modular synthesis together with original footage shot by Moussa. Developed over approximately ten months, the work took shape through periods of working on the material and letting it rest, with different speeds and durations gradually introduced into the sound and image.
“Reaching Heart” is a perfect choice for the video, really; it soars, a denouement.
I don’t want to speak over them, really. Better to just listen and relisten. Even though it’s live, every moment lands — a practiced gymnastics routine on the edge of a volcano.
Here are the extended notes from Ruptured:
Composed, performed, and produced entirely by Atoui in Beirut, the album emerged during a prolonged period of instability and suspended time. Rather than treating sound as narrative or abstraction, It Will Take Forever approaches it as bodily experience through overwhelming low-end pressure, unstable textures, saturation, collapse, and moments of fragile stillness.
Developed through live performance contexts, these pieces were conceived to be experienced at high volume in physical space. The work draws from Atoui’s early relationship to rave culture and club sound, though rhythm here is dismantled and stretched into immersive walls of electronics, feedback, distortion, and drifting harmonic residue. What remains is intensity without release, endurance without fixed structure.
Mixed by Anthony Sahyoun and Jad Atoui at Tunefork Studios, Beirut.
Mastered by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier at Landsc8pe Studio, Montréal.
Artwork and design by Hatem Imam.
Ruptured is on a roll again, despite the situation. Scrambled Eggs as a musical project is not a bad place to begin the story of this current arc I’ve been covering — a band formed of a who’s who of Beirut faces, pulled together amidst another “period of upheaval and uncertainty in Lebanon.” (Their words, anyway. One album is from 2006.) That band got together again and just had a reunion, and while sonically it’s very, very different from Jad’s album, it’s a great addition to your required listening list.
Charbel Haber – guitars, vocals
Marc Codsi – guitars
Tony Elieh – bass
Malek Rizkallah – drums
I can’t say enough good things about Sandy Chamoun’s album, either. Sawt El Doumouh reaches into the heart, directly speaking to the horrors Israel inflicted on Gaza and now Lebanon.