After the beguiling, quietly mesmerising tapestry of Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh, Berlin-based Syrian musician Khaled Kurbeh turns to the piano on Ithā Sajā (إذا سجى), a collection recorded in his studio between 2021 and 2022. The two records were conceived during the same period, although their methods could hardly be more different. Kurbeh likens the painstaking layering of Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh to painting; Ithā Sajā was closer to “pencil-scribbles on paper”.
The album opens in a sublimely unemphatic tone with “wal-Leil (واللّيلْ)”. Kurbeh has often looked to visual artists when thinking about pattern and repetition, and in Agnes Martin he finds something of a kindred spirit. To borrow from her writings, “the frailest stems, quivering in light, bend and break in silence.”
“wan-Najmi (والنّجمِ)” has the quality of a game of cat and mouse, a repeated figure continually making minute adjustments to itself. Its patterns were inspired partly by rugs from Afrin, particularly those made by weavers from leftover threads for their own use, where repetition accommodates irregularity rather than eliminating it. “Ithā Hawā (إذا هوى)” is more languid and faintly jazz-inflected, allowing phrases to hang in the air before deciding where to go next.
The four brief Tadāris pieces centre on experimentation. Lasting between one and two minutes, they resemble rhythmic sketches and retain the playfulness already apparent in “wan-Najmi”. Kurbeh approaches the piano as a physical object: hands move across the black keys, mallets strike its lower strings, while a glass marble, bell and tuning hammer extend its vocabulary. Keys murmur, surfaces are swept and struck.
The album is clear and crystalline, never clouded by overthinking. Its precision leaves room for accident, variation and the pleasure of trying something to see where it leads. This is particularly apparent in Kurbeh’s practice of muhawalāt, or attempts, where repetition need not bring an idea closer to a definitive version. A pattern can simply be tried again and emerge slightly altered.
A certain nocturnal calm gives the final piece its extraordinary patience. Notes remain suspended while the ending is imperceptibly deferred for several brief moments. Nothing is pressed for a conclusion. Throughout Ithā Sajā, Kurbeh works with a remarkable economy of language, attentive to what a small gesture can contain and equally aware of when to leave it alone. An outlet for gestures, sonic footnotes and observations from everyday life, Ithā Sajā is an album “smiling with innocence.”
photo by Youngjun Kim
To discuss the production process for the album we reached out directly to Khaled Kurbeh.
Although Ithā Sajā is your newest release, its nine pieces were recorded in your Berlin studio back in 2021 and 2022. Why did you return to these recordings four or five years later, and what made this the right moment to release them? Did you immediately think of them as an album, or did Ithā Sajā only reveal itself as a coherent body of work when you revisited the recordings from a distance?
I recorded Ithā Sajā (2021-22) while working on Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh (2019-23). It was a little excursion within the larger wander of Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh [to each space its own rhythm].
I’ve been in touch with Maryos Syawish and Alessandra Peach from Research Records since 2018. I was sharing ideas and fragments with them which would later become pieces on the albums. But it wasn’t until I was making the tracklist that I saw them as two separate releases. We decided to release the electroacoustic album first, followed by the solo piano pieces. Like starting with the last chapter of a book.
Looking back at the two releases now, I see the processes used on Likulli were sort of like painting. Lots of layering and stretching. Colours needed time to dry. I was obsessed with all its details. Ithā Sajā was the sound version of pencil-scribbles on paper.
Rhythm has been a recurring concern in your work, perhaps most explicitly in Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh, with its attention to the predictable and unpredictable rhythms of everyday life. Yet Ithā Sajā shows that some of these ideas were already present in 2021–22: the left hand maintains a steady rhythm on the title track, wan-Najmi repeats a phrase with minute variations, while wal-Leili pays homage to the jurjina rhythm found in the folk music of northern Iraq and Mesopotamia. How were you thinking about rhythm when you recorded these pieces, and looking back now, can you hear ideas in Ithā Sajā that subsequently developed in Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh and your wider practice?
How I was thinking about rhythm is different for each piece. I like to think of the “Tadāris” series as a set of études (studies) for imagined dance rehearsals. I was experimenting with the piano as a sound generating object for bodily gestures. It’s an ongoing series that explores the instrument’s percussive potential. Fascinated by all the possibilities of playing its surface, keys, hammers, tuning pins, pedals and strings. In “Tadāris I,” for instance, I imagined creating waves. Moving, crashing and settling. This piece is performed with two hands on the black keys. In “Tadāris II” and “Tadāris III,” I imagined the terrains of a distant mountain. This piece is played with two mallets on two octaves of the lower strings. In “Tadāris IV,” I imagined someone standing still and looking up, their dancing eyes chasing scattered stars. This piece is performed with a glass marble, a little bell and a small metal tuning hammer.
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“wal-Leili.” Whenever my friend Raman Khalaf and I get together we experiment with playing new rhythms. But somehow, we (almost) always end up playing variations of the same rhythm: jurjina (10/16). It’s been like that since Aphorisms (2017). We meet up, have some tea, swap instruments, have more tea, then get back to our instruments. One of us says: “OK, play something and I’ll join in. Anything but jurjina!” But alas, we just love coming back to it. That’s how pieces like “Al Baseet” and “Shamal” (from Aphorisms) were made. “wal-Leili” is a solo piano
version of a piece for piano and oud.
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“wan-Najmi” is inspired by the patterned rugs of Afrin. From afar they may look similar but when you get close you see this is actually a different pattern. The most interesting rugs actually are the ones that are made from left over threads. Those are the ones weavers keep for themselves. They’re not for the market. And they defy symmetry. “wan-Najmi” is inspired by people’s obsessions with patterns. There was a time when I became obsessed with listening to how painters speak about their work, specifically about pattern and repetition. I was inspired by Etel Adnan talking about painting the same mountain over and over. About her fascination with the moon. By Ida Lawrence’s intricate, imperfect patterns and funny stories in her carpet series (“Mats for Snacks” / “Snacks on Mats” and “Good Intentions”). By everything Agnes Martins says in the documentary Agnes Martin: With My Back to the World.
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“wal-Leil” is inspired by conversations with Hind Kahwaji and Widjan Nasif about their experiences as Syrian political prisoners in the 1990s and the time they staged a play inside the jail — against all odds. Their stories of secretly rehearsing and creating the set stayed with me. Wijdan made a rock out of egg trays that she had collected over time.
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So yeah, I’m in constant awe of what rhythm can be. It’s more than a time signature… it’s the retelling of stories, habits, conversation, organising, little acts of defiance, very slow time, accumulation, returning…
Exhibition, Likulli Fadain Eqaeh, 2025, performance, Hotti Club, Zurich, Credit_ Ida Lawrence
The liner notes locate these recordings very precisely between dusk and dawn, Kreuzberg and Tempelhof, but also among the sounds of swallows in the Hinterhof, construction sites, upstairs neighbours and the U-Bahn. This sensitivity to the rhythms of a particular environment also appears in hawāmesh al-Marj and later in the field recordings of Likulli Fadāin Eqāéh. Yet on Ithā Sajā the surrounding city seems to enter principally through the circumstances of playing and recording.
How much did those interruptions and environmental rhythms influence the performances themselves? When you hear the album now, do you also hear a document of the Berlin in which you were living in 2021 and 2022?
I tried to map the recurring rhythms in my Berlin studio and its surroundings – in order to record around them. I wanted to make the recording process like a game. For example, I would try and record between subway trips. The shorter pieces were recorded earlier in the evening when the subway runs at shorter intervals. The last piece on the record, Ithā Sajā, was recorded when all my neighbours, dogs and birds of our Hinterhof (backyard) were asleep. That allowed the performance to be slow and patient. It allowed me to take my time between pressing the record button and starting to play. Recording a little before dawn, listening at twilight.
Some of those rhythms include: the first and last swallow chirps of the day, our florist neighbour repotting plants, construction drills, the vegetable shop chants (Gurken! Gurken! Gurken!) and our neighbours’ dogs barking at one another across buildings. Those are the sounds I’m reminded of when I listen back. All the sounds in-between, smudged under the carpet.
Your practice of muhawalāt—attempts or variations—seems particularly relevant to Ithā Sajā: “wan-Najmi” revolves around a phrase undergoing subtle changes, the four Tadāris pieces belong to an ongoing series of acoustic études, and on the title track your right hand “wanders in search of a nocturnal motif”. Ida Lawrence’s booklet extends this idea visually through nine repetitions of your upright piano, taking shape or disintegrating as the pages turn. Given that the recordings themselves remained with you for several years before being released, has that distance changed what an “attempt” means to you? Is there something important in allowing a musical idea to remain provisional—even when it eventually becomes part of a finished record?
It’s through attempts, variation and repetition that I follow my curiosity.
Working with variations for me, is less about recording a “better” take or finding what works “best” and more about enjoying the process of discovery. It’s like saying the same sentence with different punctuation. Sometimes the comma goes here, sometimes there. Observing how meaning shifts, or not.
For me, improvising is making gestures in real time. A process of discovering new ways of listening and responding. A wander that I really enjoy. Composing is an extension of that process. It’s a form of imagination, a way of playing with time by layering, stretching, repeating and rearranging things.
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The idea of muhawalāt really comes to life through the artwork: starting as images for the album cover, growing into a booklet in conversation with designer Rik Watkinson, which then grew into an exhibition & performance event curated by Donia Jornod and Jeremy Ratib at Hotti Club, Zürich following the release of Likulli in 2025. It was such a treat to experience the visual and sonic muhawalat together with an audience who were invited to devour sunflower seeds during a section of the performance, contributing an audible cracking chorus.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
