Lebanese musician, producer, and sound engineer Fadi Tabbal's work consists of guitar pieces ranging from stripped acoustics to ambient and electronic-inspired treatments. He has released four solo albums since 2013, including The Museum Of Disappearing Buildings [Beacon Sound/Ruptured] and Music For The Lonely Vol. 1 (2017-2018) [Beacon Sound] and recently spearheaded the Beirut Musicians Fund, set up to aid musicians in Beirut who lost equipment in the explosion at the Port of Beirut, which was covered by Pitchfork, The Wire, and others. Often referred to as 'the hardest-working man in Lebanon's alternative music scene,' Tabbal relocated to Beirut in 2006, following studies in sound engineering in Montreal; he promptly established Tunefork Recording Studios, a specialized work-space which offers customized services including full band recordings, live sound, music production and composition. Tabbal is a full-time member of several Lebanese bands including electronic duo Stress/Distress and The Bunny Tylers (with Charbel Haber) and has collaborated with Mike Cooper, Postcards, Sharif Sehnaoui, Kinematik, and Oiseaux-Tempete, to name but a few. In addition to handling engineering and production tasks at Tunefork Studios, Tabbal is a specialist in sound design and conception. He has worked on a variety of projects through the years, including sound and music installations for Lebanese art ensemble The Feel Collective, Nada Kano's Beirut Dance Studio, Petra Serhal, Sursock Museum, as well as music and sound design for films by Maher Abi-Samra, Rania Rafei, Roy Deeb, Chadi Aoun, Nadim Tabet, among others. He has been the technical director of Irtijal, the region's leading experimental music festival, since 2011 and has been teaching sound at the Académie Libanaise Des Beaux-Arts since 2012.
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LP
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BNSD 055LP
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Lebanese musician, producer, and sound engineer Fadi Tabbal's work consists of guitar pieces ranging from stripped acoustics to ambient and electronic-inspired treatments. He has released four solo albums since 2013, including The Museum Of Disappearing Buildings (BNSD 023LP) and Music For The Lonely Vol. 1 (2017-2018) and recently spearheaded the Beirut Musicians Fund, set up to aid musicians in Beirut who lost equipment in the explosion at the Port of Beirut. Tabbal is a full-time member of several Lebanese bands including electronic duo Stress/Distress and The Bunny Tylers (with Charbel Haber) and has collaborated with Mike Cooper, Postcards, Sharif Sehnaoui, Kinematik, and Oiseaux-Tempete, to name but a few.
Lebanon's capital city of Beirut sits on one of the world's most turbulent fault lines, with a hostile and expansionist neighbor to the south (the settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel), a civil-war-riven country to the east and north (Syria), and a domestic situation that features a deeply-corrupt sectarian ruling elite, millions of refugees from Palestine and Syria, months of revolutionary protests, and a collapsed economy. Beirut, however, has long been a vibrant and diverse beacon of Arab and Mediterranean culture. Recent decades have seen the emergence of an internationally-recognized contemporary music, art, and dance scene; a vocal LGBTQ+ movement; and an interconnected web of efforts around refugee rights, democratic government, public health, and environmental concerns. Equal parts heartbreaking and inspiring, the city carries on, even thrives, against all odds. The massive explosion at the Port of Beirut on August 4th, which decimated some of the city's most beautiful and progressive neighborhoods, stands indeed as a tragic example of some of the worst ills afflicting humanity in 2020. But it also revealed a few long-simmering reasons for hope: citizens coming together in widespread acts of mutual aid, emphasizing what brings people together over what divides them, and rising up en masse against a corrupt economic system and the geopolitical power structures it engenders. As American cities revolt against totalitarianism and for racial justice, with Portland at the forefront, Lebanon beckons as both a cautionary tale and an example of the persistence necessary in order to take down a dying order in an era of existential threats.
Recorded and mixed between January and April 2020 at Tunefork Studios and at home, Beirut. Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll. Release by Beacon Sound and Ruptured. Includes download; edition of 300.
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BNSD 023LP
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Lebanese musician, producer, and sound engineer Fadi Tabbal's work consists of guitar pieces ranging from stripped acoustics to ambient and shoegaze-inspired treatments. Tabbal has been central to the thriving Beirut music scene since the late 2000s, running Tunefork Studios and playing in multiple bands, including Under The Carpet and The Bunny Tylers. He has collaborated with Lebanese art ensemble The Feel Collective, Nada Kano's Beirut-based dance company, and numerous film producers. Museum of Disappearing Buildings is his second solo album and the first co-release from Portland-based Beacon Sound and Beirut-based Ruptured. It is an album of ambient guitar drones and grainy electronics that reflects the precarious political and social environment of Beirut while also being inspired by the impossible structures of Russian paper architects Brodsky and Utkin. Limited edition of 300.
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RPTD 015CD
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Third solo album from Fadi Tabbal, lead guitarist with Lebanese psychedelic rock band The Incompetents and various others. How's Annie continues further the work of sound exploration through guitar treatments, which began with On the Rooftop Looking Up (2013) - a finely-devised interaction of ambient soundscapes with John Fahey-inspired acoustic meanderings - and developed further on 2015's Museum of Disappearing Buildings (TFRK 002CD) - an interplay of ambient guitar drones and grainy electronics. For his third album, Tabbal continues further his exploration of electronics, beats and synthetic sounds through his guitar. The single, 32-minute track brings to mind the early work of sonic mavericks Ben Frost, Tim Hecker and Daniel Lopatin. Recorded live in one take without any cuts or overdubs. Edition of 250.
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TFRK 002CD
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Fadi Tabbal, lead guitarist with Lebanese psychedelic rock band The Incompetents and various other alternative outfits, presents his second solo album, Museum of Disappearing Buildings. This album continues his sound exploration through guitar treatments, which began with 2013's On the Rooftop Looking Up. While the young guitarist's first album featured a finely devised interaction of ambient soundscapes and John Fahey-inspired finger-picking acoustic meanderings, this second solo outing adopts a different approach -- it relies on an interplay of ambient guitar drones and grainy electronics, which recalls somewhat the work of early krautrock vanguard artists from the 1970s, the leftfield exploration of British electro-acoustic practitioners from the mid-1970s, and the radical works of American minimalistic composers from the 1960s. As in his first outing, Tabbal preferred a radical and direct approach to composition and recording, opting for the intimacy and self-reflection of home recordings over the traditional environment of a recording studio. At the heart of the album resides one unifying concept, which finds its way into the resulting musical bed: the sketches, impossible structures, and urban configurations of Russian paper architects Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin.
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