Baher / Music for the end of the world

I composed this album during the last end of the world. Not the current one, but the one before. The fourth or the fifth… I lost count. Maybe before fascism took over Europe, or before the Beirut port exploded, I’m not sure. This is not a celebration of the apocalypse, nor a shamanic dance. It’s a dive into the distant past, around the 1930s, I think. It was the age of the first recordings in the Arab world, while my grandparents were still living in Palestine, before they were massacred or deported, before their own end of the world.
These are fragments of lost, forgotten recordings that I found in the sand by the sea. I pieced them together as much as I could with the only glue I had: analog sound machines, more or less recent. Who were these voices ? I have no idea. Well, sometimes I have a fragment of information, a title, a name, a date. But most of the time, I just listen and my fingers start to move gently. When I squint my eyes, it’s because I see something I can’t describe, but it’s there, and it makes me want to inhabit the song, to live in it for days.