How a city I first encountered through war cinema became a map of memory, friendship and radical sound
For years, Beirut existed in my imagination as a sequence of conflicting images: a city under bombardment, a Mediterranean capital of nightlife, the home of Fairuz, and a meeting point of Arab, Armenian and European histories. Its current independent music scene brings these different Beiruts together—not by resolving their contradictions, but by turning them into sound.
My first Beirut was not a real city. It was a film.
I encountered it through Volker Schlöndorff’s Circle of Deceit, the English title of Die Fälschung, at Tbilisi’s House of Cinema. The Beirut on screen was inseparable from war: damaged buildings, journalists, uncertainty and fear. That image stayed with me—and returned with particular force during the civil war in Tbilisi in the early 1990s.
But another Beirut gradually appeared.
While serving in the Soviet Army in Baku, I listened to Radio Monte Carlo’s Arabic broadcasts from Cyprus. Through them came songs and voices very different from the images I had inherited from cinema and television. Fairuz entered that private geography. Her voice did not erase the city of war, but gave Beirut another dimension: intimate, poetic and emotionally precise.
Later, Lebanese students in Tbilisi described Beirut as a Mediterranean jewel—with cafés, food, nightlife, humour and social energy. After moving to Germany, I met an Armenian man from Beirut whose grandmother had been born in Georgia. Beirut began to seem less like a distant city and more like part of a circular history linking Georgia, Armenia, Lebanon and Europe.
More recently, after starting a business in the Czech Republic, I began working with people from Beirut whom I now consider trusted partners. By then, the city had become personal. It was no longer simply a symbol of war or glamour.
And then there was the music.
A scene built on friction
Over the past decade, Beirut’s club and experimental scenes have become increasingly visible internationally. Yet what distinguishes the city is not simply the strength of its musicians. It is the way they work inside contradiction without attempting to smooth it away.
The scene has changed materially since 2024. It is no longer best understood as a local community contained within one city. It has become a dispersed network connecting Beirut with Montreal, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Lisbon and other centres. Artists leave, return, collaborate remotely, mix records in Beirut and circulate through international festivals and labels.
There is no single contemporary “Beirut sound.” There is, however, a shared attitude: friction matters more than fusion.
The phrase “East meets West” is almost useless here. Beirut’s most compelling musicians do something more difficult. Arabic poetry can exist beside psychedelic guitar. Tarab can collide with industrial rhythm. Oud, field recordings, modular synthesis, free jazz and pop vocals do not merge into a smooth hybrid. They rub against one another.
Sandy Chamoun, vocalist of SANAM, has described the group’s process as placing different elements in a blender without allowing them to fuse completely. That is also a useful image for the wider scene.
On “Habibon,” SANAM combine Arabic-language vocals, buzuk, live drums, psych-rock and improvisation. The music feels ancient and immediate at once, unstable in the best sense—as if the arrangement is being negotiated in real time.
Chamoun’s solo track “Ward W Shok” moves into a more electronic psychological space. Her voice carries the force of Arabic vocal tradition, but the surrounding production presses against it rather than framing it respectfully from a distance.
Tradition here is not ornament. It is structure.
Memory made audible
Perhaps the strongest thread running through Beirut’s new music is the treatment of sound as an archive.
Mayssa Jallad’s work is central to this development. Trained in architecture and historic preservation, she approaches Beirut’s wartime buildings not merely as subjects for lyrics, but as compositional forms. In Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels, architecture becomes melody and damaged buildings become characters.
The Muzorama playlist includes two sides of this practice. “Taamir (Bahriyyeh)” balances voice, place and historical research. “Holiday Inn (January to March) [Version],” created with Civilistjävel!, pushes the same material into a heavier electronic space, placing Jallad’s voice above dub-like bass and post-industrial atmosphere.
Other artists approach memory through tape, objects and technology. Joy Moughanni incorporates archival recordings from the Lebanese Civil War into restrained electronic structures. Nour Sokhon uses interviews and field recordings of migration-related objects. Yasmine Hamdan transforms memory into intimate song: on “Shadia,” elegance and unease coexist in a voice that can sound almost private while carrying the weight of a whole city.
Beirut’s instability also enters the music through the conditions of production. Electricity shortages and unreliable infrastructure shape when and how artists can work. Interruption is not merely a metaphor; it becomes part of the creative environment.
Jad Atoui has explored malfunctioning computer hard drives as sound-producing objects. Sary Moussa processes improvisations on instruments such as saz, buzuk and Hammond organ until only their “shadows” remain—traces of a tradition felt rather than directly quoted.
Youmna Saba’s work with oud, voice and electronics follows another path. On “Ahad,” the acoustic and digital elements reshape one another. The oud is neither preserved as a museum object nor simply added to electronic production.
This matters because international coverage of Arab experimental music still often searches for obvious ethnic markers: an oud over a beat, a maqam phrase inside techno, a recognisable vocal sample. Beirut’s strongest artists resist that easy legibility. They are not translating themselves for the listener. They are building their own systems.
Liliane Chlela’s “Msh S7ab,” created with LA =, makes that resistance physical. Drum-and-bass velocity, abrasive electronics and Arabic vocals move through one another without settling into a familiar category. Toni Geitani’s “Ruwaydan Ruwaydan” is more cinematic, combining Arabic vocal forms, dark ambient space, industrial weight and deep bass.
Both artists now live outside Lebanon, but their work demonstrates why Beirut’s scene cannot be mapped only by residence. The diaspora remains connected through studios, collaborators, labels and shared political realities. Distance is not absence. It is another compositional condition.
The people and spaces behind the music
Beirut’s scene depends on a small number of studios, labels and cultural spaces that function as technical and social infrastructure.
Tunefork Studios, founded by Fadi Tabbal, has become one of the decisive centres of Lebanon’s alternative music. Ruptured has played an equally important role as both label and archive, while the Beirut Synth Center has provided access to tools, knowledge and community.
During periods of military escalation and displacement, these networks have also supported mutual-aid initiatives and benefit releases, including the Land compilations. In Beirut, cultural infrastructure and civic infrastructure can become inseparable.
The final piece in the Muzorama playlist, “A Simple Song About Weather and Murder” by Abed Kobeissy with Sary Moussa, captures something of this logic. Its title holds ordinary life and violence in the same sentence.
PRAED’s “Assarab” offers another kind of release: clarinet, repetition, psychedelic momentum and shaabi-derived energy. Makram A. Hosn’s “Opening Prayer” represents Beirut’s jazz and improvisational continuum. Charif Megarbane’s “The Invisible Cut” brings analogue groove and cinematic playfulness.
Together, these tracks prevent the mix from becoming a document of darkness alone.
Thirteen tracks closer to Beirut
I began with a Beirut created by cinema: a city of war seen through the eyes of outsiders.
Over time, radio, friendship, food, migration and work gave me other versions. Fairuz complicated the war film. Lebanese students in Tbilisi complicated the headlines. An Armenian family story in Münster connected Beirut back to Georgia. My partners in the Czech Republic turned the city from an idea into a relationship.
The music in this edition does not provide a final or “correct” Beirut. That would be another simplification.
Instead, these thirteen tracks offer thirteen partial cities: SANAM’s collective friction, Yasmine Hamdan’s intimate ambiguity, Sandy Chamoun’s exposed voice, Mayssa Jallad’s architectural memory, Liliane Chlela’s diasporic refusal, Toni Geitani’s industrial radiance and PRAED’s delirious propulsion.
For most of my life, Beirut reached me indirectly: through a film, a radio signal from Cyprus, a song, a conversation, a meal, a person passing through another city.
Perhaps that is why music feels like the most honest way to approach it.
Not as war or nightlife. Not as tragedy or glamour.
But as a frequency that keeps travelling.
