"Wind, Again" is Sary Moussa’s fourth studio album and second album on Other People. Based
between France and Lebanon, Moussa returns with a riveting electro-acoustic album informed by his
ever-changing relationships to space, listening, and resonance as well as his growing interest in the
study of harmonics in electronic and electro-acoustic music.

Years in the making, “Wind, Again” approaches distinct musical worlds and languages by bringing
together improvisations by musicians performing on Western and West Asian instruments such as the
Hammond organ, clarinet, saz, and buzuk with electronic arrangements and textures. Rather than
force a rapprochement of these musical worlds through the instruments, and keenly aware of the
weighty sonic histories they carry, Moussa proposes another way through which they can exist
together in contemporary electronic composition.

Composed of six tracks, each of which demonstrate an array of recording and processing techniques,
the album generates moments of tension produced by the synthesis of textural, tonal, and harmonic
encounters that Moussa calls “shadows”, which outline an impressionistic musical language, existing
at the edge of familiarity. Such moments permeate tracks like “Everywhere at once” and “Violence”
that open with the Hammond organ and the saz respectively and slowly reveal an expansive field of
sounds that showcases each of the musicians’ characteristic performances and Moussa’s densely
layered textures. It is a latent yet unrelenting tension through which the composer invokes rather than
represents a collective experiential state, especially familiar to those who know his environment. In
“Wind, Again” these shadows are articulations of sounds steeped in traditions they are never quite
tethered to. Such articulations are implied and alluded to, they play within a musical reference without
the latter explicitly existing in the recording, always teetering, never completely here nor there.
Sonically and musically, the album is fueled by the cultural, social, and personal realities that Moussa
was brought up and lives in.
Both personal and musical ties with the musicians who feature on the album is central to Moussa’s
practice. In the title track “I will never write a song about you”, musician Julia Sabra opens with rolled
piano chords, followed by Paed Conca on clarinet and Abed Kobeissy on buzuk, before Moussa’s
electronic processing pieces together, lifts, and sustains the melodic direction of the track that
emerged from the musicians’ separate improvisations. For Moussa: “The initial connection between
the three performances was made on a track that no longer existed, the original recording was both
an obstacle and necessary step for the track we hear on the record. It’s as if we were all telling
different stories and I pulled on the thread that held them together”. The track, and more generally the
record, is tinged with a melancholy of things lost, though it never fully succumbs to it.
“Everything inside a circle”, Moussa’s most personal track and for which he provides the only vocals
on the record, harkens back to a childhood memory of listening to music with his mother in a car:
“There was a sound I was looking for — a memory of a sound and how I first heard it. This track is a
hybrid of that memory and what I wanted to make of it”. The track relies heavily on generativesystems and perhaps embodies most the ambiguous quality of the record’s music in its refusal to be
pinned down by one musical tradition or another.
“Wind, Again” is both familiar and alien, cold and warm; it pays homage to the mechanics, materials,
and tactility of the instruments and converges acoustic and synthetic spaces. What anchors the sound
of the album are the elements of a whole that cannot find its own idiosyncrasy and that is precisely
why Moussa’s album is a tour de force.[info sheet from distr.]