Tarek Atoui: influences, peers and legacy

Every connection with its receipt

Tarek Atoui works where composition, instrument-building and curatorial practice dissolve into one another — electroacoustic training in France, a Beirut improv lineage, and a decade-long inquiry into deaf and hard-of-hearing listening. This mix maps the musique concrète and experimental-music inheritance behind his sound sculptures, the Arab instrument traditions he reverse-engineers, and the Levantine scene that formed him.

The Kynda mix for Tarek Atoui

• Key Influence · Étude aux chemins de fer by Pierre Schaeffer (1948). Atoui's formation was in electroacoustic composition in France, the tradition Schaeffer founded with his railway études and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. Schaeffer's premise — that any recorded sound is compositional material, detached from its source — underwrites Atoui's practice of building instruments from motors, water tanks and contact mics. The reduced-listening ideal also prefigures his insistence that listening itself, not the score, is the artwork.
• Influencia Obscura · Ta'abir Al-Zaar (The Expression of Zaar) by Halim El-Dabh (1944). El-Dabh recorded a Cairo zaar exorcism ceremony on a wire recorder and processed it in a radio studio years before Schaeffer's Paris studio was formalized — arguably the first work of tape music, made in the Arab world. For an artist like Atoui, who treats Arab musical and ritual material as technological material rather than folklore, El-Dabh is the buried precedent: electroacoustic modernity emerging from Egypt, not Europe.
• Local Roots · Starry Night by Mazen Kerbaj (2006). Kerbaj recorded his trumpet duetting with Israeli bombardment from a Beirut balcony during the 2006 war — the defining document of the city's free-improvisation scene. Atoui emerged from that same Beirut milieu around Irtijal, the festival Kerbaj co-founded, where improvisers worked without institutional support or a conservatory pipeline. The scene's ethic of improvised infrastructure runs straight through Atoui's self-built instruments.
• Beyond the Medium · Enta Omri by Umm Kulthum (1964). Atoui's Visiting Tarab drew on the Arab music archive at Beirut's AMAR Foundation, treating tarab — the ecstatic feedback loop between performer and listening audience, with its calls and repeated phrases — as a model of collective listening rather than repertoire. Umm Kulthum's extended qasida performances, where a single line returns transformed by audience response, provide the historical case study his installations abstract into sculpture.
• Peer · Fingertap Quartet by Christine Sun Kim (2018). Kim, a Deaf artist, works through notation, charts and vibration to expose how sound is socially owned and policed, exhibiting in the same biennial and museum circuit as Atoui. Both arrived at listening-without-hearing as an artistic premise in the 2010s, and both treat the gallery as a space to redistribute acoustic authority. Their parallel careers made the question of Deaf listening visible in contemporary art rather than only in music.
• From the Canon · WITHIN by Tarek Atoui (2013). The long-form project that reorganized his whole practice: a years-long collaboration with Deaf and hard-of-hearing performers, instrument designers and schools, producing instruments played and felt through surfaces, water and bone conduction. It turned Atoui from a composer presenting concerts into an artist building perceptual infrastructures, and it generated the exhibitions, workshops and performance formats that structure everything he has made since.
• Key Collaborator · Khamsin by Sharif Sehnaoui (2016). Sehnaoui co-founded Irtijal, the Beirut festival that gave Atoui and his generation their first platform, and his prepared-guitar work defines the city's free-improvisation sound. Atoui's early performance years ran through that festival's network of visiting and local improvisers. Hearing Sehnaoui's solo language — scraped strings, objects, extended silences — clarifies the improvisational ear Atoui brings to his otherwise sculptural installations.
• Legacy · Requiem for the Enemy by Khyam Allami (2013). Allami, an Iraqi-British oud player and researcher, builds tools and software for non-Western tuning systems and argues that music technology encodes Western assumptions. That critique — that instruments and interfaces are political objects to be rebuilt — is the terrain Atoui opened for a younger generation of Arab experimental practitioners. Both move between the AMAR-style archive, academic research and the concert stage.

What influenced Tarek Atoui

• Michel Waisvisz. Atoui explicitly calls Waisvisz an inspiration. “In my case, Michel was a friend and inspiration, and somebody I had the honour of meeting in the last few years of his life, when I was a resident at 26 or 27 years old.” (The Quietus)
• Rainforest IV by David Tudor (1973). Rainforest IV (David Tudor) — ghost for Tarek Atoui (musicbrainz.org)
• Deep Listening by Pauline Oliveros (1989). Deep Listening (Pauline Oliveros) — titan for Tarek Atoui (musicbrainz.org)
• I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier (1969). I Am Sitting in a Room (Alvin Lucier) — titan for Tarek Atoui (musicbrainz.org)
• Metamorphosis by Iannis Xenakis (1957). Metamorphosis (Iannis Xenakis) — culture for Tarek Atoui
• Étude aux chemins de fer by Pierre Schaeffer (1948). Étude aux chemins de fer (Pierre Schaeffer) — titan for Tarek Atoui
• Enta Omri by Umm Kulthum (1964). Enta Omri (Umm Kulthum) — culture for Tarek Atoui
• Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf by Oliver Sacks (1989). Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf (Oliver Sacks) — culture for Tarek Atoui
• Ta'abir Al-Zaar (The Expression of Zaar) by Halim El-Dabh (1944). Ta'abir Al-Zaar (The Expression of Zaar) (Halim El-Dabh) — ghost for Tarek Atoui

Peers and kindred spirits

• STEIM. Atoui held an artistic-director role at STEIM. “2007 and 2008 Artistic co-directors Tarek Atoui and Mazen Kerbaj are featured in an article in this month’s The WIRE .” (STEIM)
• Uriel Barthélémi. Performance credits place Atoui and Barthélémi together on La Suite, but do not establish a connection to Les Pleureuses. “Invited to create a music performance with Atoui’s instrument collection, Barthélémi will use the acoustic possibilities of the room to explore different resonating frequencies.” (NTU CCA Singapore Digital Archive)
• Alexandre Guirkinger. Guirkinger is identified as Atoui’s long-term collaborator and helped create the accompanying publication. “Produced in partnership with Atoui's long-term collaborator, French photographer Alexandre Guirkinger, the publication captures and articulates the Sydney components of this dynamic contemporary artwork.” (Alexandre Guirkinger)
• Éric La Casa. Atoui worked with La Casa on recordings for I/E. “This publication includes an interview between Tarek Atoui and his long-time collaborator, artist and musician Eric La Casa; a visual contribution by photographer Alexandre Guirkinger;” (Galerie Chantal Crousel)
• Mazen Kerbaj. STEIM documents their successive artistic co-directorships, but not a collaboration on Beyrouth Bye Bye. “2007 and 2008 Artistic co-directors Tarek Atoui and Mazen Kerbaj are featured in an article in this month’s The WIRE .” (STEIM)
• Kristina Andersen. Clarke reports Atoui and Andersen’s collaboration on programming drawn from Waisvisz’s archives. “the artist Tarek Atoui was given access to Wasvisz’s archives. Working in collaboration with Waisvisz’s former colleague and partner, the academic and engineer Kristina Andersen, they have put together a special day of programming” (The Quietus)
• Raed Yassin. A STEIM collaborator discusses working with Atoui and Yassin in the Lebanese experimental-music scene; the passage does not identify The New Century. “Through my own collaborations with Tarek Atoui and Raed Yassin, I released my first album from the new Lebanese label Annihaya , and visited Beirut to perform in early 2010.” (STEIM)
• Rubber Coated Steel by Lawrence Abu Hamdan (2016). Rubber Coated Steel (Lawrence Abu Hamdan) — peer for Tarek Atoui (wikidata.org)
• Starry Night by Mazen Kerbaj (2006). Starry Night (Mazen Kerbaj) — geography for Tarek Atoui
• Khamsin by Sharif Sehnaoui (2016). Khamsin (Sharif Sehnaoui) — collaborator for Tarek Atoui
• The New Century by Raed Yassin (2009). The New Century (Raed Yassin) — peer for Tarek Atoui
• Fingertap Quartet by Christine Sun Kim (2018). Fingertap Quartet (Christine Sun Kim) — peer for Tarek Atoui
• Les Pleureuses by Uriel Barthélémi (2012). Les Pleureuses (Uriel Barthélémi) — collaborator for Tarek Atoui
• Beyrouth Bye Bye by Mazen Kerbaj (2017). Beyrouth Bye Bye (Mazen Kerbaj) — collaborator for Tarek Atoui
• Wonder Beirut by Lamia Joreige (2003). Wonder Beirut (Lamia Joreige) — geography for Tarek Atoui
• Khiam by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige (2000). Khiam (Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige) — geography for Tarek Atoui

Who Tarek Atoui influenced

• Shade (Zill) by Jessika Khazrik (2017). Shade (Zill) (Jessika Khazrik) — legacy for Tarek Atoui
• Requiem for the Enemy by Khyam Allami (2013). Requiem for the Enemy (Khyam Allami) — legacy for Tarek Atoui