Mia Khoirunisa
The contemporary electronic music landscape often rewards polish, predictability, and immediate gratification. Yet, amidst the ongoing geopolitical and socioeconomic volatility of Beirut, electronic artist and composer Jad Atoui has chosen a radically different path. His latest album, It Will Take Forever, stands as a monumental work of physical and emotional endurance. Composed and performed live on modular synthesizers between 2023 and 2025, the record captures the harrowing experience of living through a world being systematically dismantled. Released on the Beirut-based experimental label Ruptured, the album has recently been accompanied by an official music video for the track "Reaching Heart," directed by Ralf Moussa. Together, the audio and visual components offer a profound meditation on trauma, memory, and the somatic impact of sound.
Main Facts and Production Anatomy
It Will Take Forever is not a traditional studio album constructed through meticulous digital editing; rather, it is the crystallization of live modular synthesis shaped by prolonged periods of instability. Atoui produced, composed, and performed the album entirely in Beirut, drawing heavily on his formative experiences with rave culture and club sound design. However, instead of delivering conventional club-ready rhythms, Atoui deconstructs dance music tropes, stretching and dissolving beats into immersive walls of electronics, feedback, distortion, and drifting harmonic residue.
The physical weight of the album is central to its artistic statement. Driven by club-sized sub-bass frequencies, the music rumbles with a low-end pressure that feels inherently bodily. According to production notes from Ruptured, the tracks were explicitly conceived to be experienced at high volumes within physical spaces, treating sound not as an abstract narrative, but as a visceral, somatic encounter.
The production lineage of the album reflects a collaborative effort within Beirut’s resilient creative community. The record was mixed by Anthony Sahyoun and Jad Atoui at Tunefork Studios in Beirut, mastered by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier at Landsc8pe Studio in Montréal, and features striking graphic design and artwork by Hatem Imam.
Chronology of Development and Visual Collaboration
The genesis of It Will Take Forever spans a turbulent two-year window, capturing the shifting psychological landscapes of artists working under extreme duress in Lebanon.
- 2023–2025: Atoui continually composes and performs the material live on modular systems in Beirut, allowing the pieces to evolve organically through real-time execution rather than rigid sequencing.
- 2024–2025: Filmmaker Ralf Moussa collaborates with Atoui to develop a visual companion piece. Over an approximate ten-month period, Moussa captures original footage designed to intersect with Atoui’s modular compositions.
- 2025: The album receives widespread critical recognition, including an extensive four-page feature in the September issue of The Wire, signaling a long-overdue shift in how international music journalism engages with artists from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The official music video for "Reaching Heart"—the album’s soaring, denouement-like centerpiece—is released.
The resulting video by Moussa functions as an abstract temporal score. By fragmenting the visual material at varying speeds and durations, the film mirrors the psychological phenomenon of trauma, where memories feel simultaneously shattered and forcibly held in place. The creative team has likened this visual and auditory shuffling to a modern-day epic, evoking the structural fragmentation of classical literature like the Iliad or the Odyssey.
Supporting Data and Contextualizing the Beirut Experimental Scene
Atoui’s work does not exist in a vacuum; it is part of a broader, enduring legacy of avant-garde and experimental music emerging from Lebanon during successive eras of crisis. Ruptured Records, the label behind the release, has long served as a vital incubator for boundary-pushing artists in Beirut.
The resilience of the local scene is further underscored by the recent reunion and retrospective activity of Scrambled Eggs. Originally formed during a previous period of intense upheaval and uncertainty in Lebanon—yielding a landmark album in 2006—the group features a powerhouse lineup of Beirut’s underground music veterans: Charbel Haber on guitars and vocals, Marc Codsi on guitars, Tony Elieh on bass, and Malek Rizkallah on drums. Though sonically distinct from Atoui’s cavernous modular soundscapes, Scrambled Eggs’ enduring legacy provides essential context for the intergenerational resilience of Beirut’s creative community.
Furthermore, contemporary releases like Sandy Chamoun’s Sawt El Doumouh continue this tradition of politically and emotionally charged sonic art, directly confronting the devastating human tolls inflicted upon Gaza and Lebanon. These works collectively challenge international listeners to confront regional tragedies beyond sanitized news cycles.
Official Responses and Critical Reception
The international music community has increasingly turned its gaze toward the vibrancy and urgency of Lebanon’s underground music infrastructure. Historically, international publications have frequently categorized art from the region through tokenizing geographic descriptors, appending "MENA" labels as cultural asterisks. However, critical milestones—such as Atoui’s prominent four-page feature in The Wire—demonstrate a growing appetite for substantive, context-aware engagement with the region’s contemporary classical, ambient, and experimental practitioners.
In its official liner notes, Ruptured elaborates on the deliberate pacing and structural philosophy governing Atoui’s compositions:
"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… What remains is intensity without release, endurance without fixed structure."
This methodology reflects a practiced artistic discipline operating under immense psychological pressure—akin to performing gymnastics on the edge of an active volcano.
Broader Impact and Implications for Experimental Music
The release of It Will Take Forever offers critical implications for how experimental electronic music documents contemporary socio-political collapse. By eschewing linear narrative in favor of structural instability, saturation, and micro-tonal persistence, Atoui expands the expressive vocabulary of modular synthesis.
The album proves that electronic music rooted in club culture does not require traditional drop-and-release structures to achieve emotional resonance. Instead, by stretching rhythm into monolithic walls of feedback and harmonic residue, Atoui captures the psychological sensation of suspended time—a state where days, months, and years blur under the weight of chronic uncertainty.
As international audiences increasingly look to Beirut not merely as a site of tragedy, but as a crucible of profound artistic innovation, works like It Will Take Forever serve as enduring testaments to the power of sound to map the human psyche when all external structures have collapsed.
