Nour Sokhon - Beirut Birds

A Closer Listen

Teeming with urgency, Beirut Birds is an example of an album released at exactly the right time.  Nour Sokhon began working on this album in Lebanon in 2018 and continued after her move to Berlin in 2021.  Her poetic soundscapes and piercing interviews are site-specific, but with a universal appeal, as migrant crises continue to unfold around the globe.  “To be in-between,” she repeats in the opening piece; the artist’s heart and memory are now split, cleaved not only by her move, but by violent conditions in Lebanon.

The Beirut Birds are heard literally on this release, flapping their wings as Sokhon intones, “to find one’s way.”  Borders are not barriers to birds, their annual migrations unimpeded by identity stops, barbed wire and the threat of arrest.  Yet in another sense, a war disrupts migration by eradicating local landmarks.  The populace far below imagines themselves flying free, avoiding checkpoints, setting out for peaceful lands or – as in “Here birds come close” – returning home despite the chaos.  Sokhon wraps the interviews in engaging settings, allowing words to loop and beats to dance around the syllables.

One of the most engaging parts of the release is the inclusion of sounds that connote migration.  Our favorite – and a sound we have never before heard credited – “bureaucratic papers.”  In “The destruction and the rebuilding,” one thinks not only of the literal sense, but the psychological, the psyche broken down by the pain of forced relocation and/or the inability to move or migrate.  All the while, the birds continue to fly overhead.

The very nature of the music is a reflection of the subject matter.  In terms of genre, one might also classify Beirut Birds as “in-between.”  The narrative is not straightforward, traveling back and forth in time; the music lies between organic and electronic, accessible and experimental.  At any point, the sounds may tilt in one direction or another, to the desert or the sea, the country or the highway, the melodic or the abstract.  The birds fly south; the birds fly north; they have a specific trajectory; less so for the displaced.  And yet, the message is conveyed.

“I came with only three things” needs little more than these words to make an impact, delivered in a tone of dejected resignation.  The two-part conclusion abandons the abstract for the specific: “My wish is easy, but hard to achieve: justice.”  We discover that “All digital album sales are donated to Haven for Artists, a feminist arts initiative from Beirut that is currently helping displaced families in Lebanon.”  What may have begun as a humble meditation has evolved into a scene report and an impassioned witness.  (Richard Allen)