If you feel at sea in a starless night, Ancient Future might summon charts from the ancestors, fragmented through samples and voltages, a hauntology of modular deconstruction. Bana Haffar, co-founder of Modular on the Spot in LA and Beirut Synthesizer Center in Lebanon, has an essential offering out this month.
We got to know Bana through the Beirut Synthesizer Center project. It’s encouraging that while this album is coming out on Touch in Montreal, Lebanon is seeing a new flurry of musical activities, including the postponed Irtijal Festival — signs of life and resistance.
Sound samples come alive on the album, interwoven with electricity so tightly as to billow, like a sail; every texture envelopes rather than feeling forced into an environment together. It’s splendid. And it’s deeply narrative, a journey in pieces.
I can’t say much more than the notes already say, as you can feel this in your bones:
Ancient Future is a stop on an ongoing quest of sample creation, manipulation, recombination, and morphological transformation through the modular synthesizer.
Densely interconnected sound matter moves between islands of respite in a sea of incomprehensibility, grasping but not yet arriving.
The ancient future is a place. It is the meeting point between the light piercing through the dark, fragmented state of our present reality.
This album is an attempt to materialize this place in sonic form.
It’s a master class in interconnection, really — in how effortlessly this stew of sound can melt together. I think it’s worth reproducing the notes from Bana’s Instagram post last week:
Thank you @touchactivities for officially planting it in the family garden! Thank you @makenoisemusic and @moogsynthesizers for your powerful instruments. special shout out to my beloved Morphagenes, Rene2s, and Mother 32s. Thank you Phil Rochefort @phi.officiel for final mixing touches. Thank you to my interdimensional partner in sound and light @jimbrown52 getting us to Guinea and to all our friends in Baro. Thank you to @jendreamers for grounding creative support 🍵🐈
Music is medicine 💞 liftoff ✈️
It’s an older piece, but it’s also worth mentioning Bana’s composition for Third Coast Percussion and modular, as it also delves into this question of how to interconnect sounds. I’m always rambling to students about Wendy Carlos and how this question of orchestrating for synths and acoustic instruments is far from trivial, maybe without making any particular impression or clear thought. But just listen to how wonderfully these threads come together. And it’s not every day you see people re-patching their instrument as they play in an acoustic ensemble, like someone applying mutes or other implements on the acoustic instrument.
Modular on the Spot, if you don’t know it, is a series that does outdoor performances with modular synths — so also harmonizing the instruments with outside environs, speaking of interconnection. She talked about the project some years ago to Synthtopia at NAMM.
I know this one will be on repeat. Healing can require redosing.
Previously: