Sara Lehad

What I call my sound matrimony is the sum of the inner and the outer elements that I hear and listen to when improvising with my machine and recording phonographies. It’s a magma of noises, concrete sounds, voices, languages, poetry, riddles, screams and, sometimes creepy stories. The composition came to me as the place where I could share the ghosts in me and the vivifiant present around me, going through a montage of phonographies and a deconstruction of the dualism in between which is a morphological sound and a representational one.

Most of the speech and human voices arise from wonderful women, some of whom are my grandmother Wardia and her friend Haljia, but also a group of women called “Medahates” whose singing voices can be heard invoking the rain with traditional prayers because of this horrible spring canicule. All these voices were recorded by myself in April 2023 in Mayache, a little Mediterranean village in the countryside of Tigzirt in the wilaya of Tizi-Ouzou in the north of this very special and plural country – both beautiful and tragic – that I was born in: Algeria. The composition was made in my studio at Pantin, France.

I borrow this title “Immemorial Echoes” from philosopher Bernard Baas’s book “L’écho de l’immémorial” published in 2016 by Hermann.

See here for translation and contextualization of the piece

Sara Lehad is a Paris based and Algiers born sound artist and researcher. She’s currently working on her PhD at l’Université Paris 8 and she studied electroacoustic music composition at le Conservatoire de Pantin. Her current research aims to decolonize her practice of music through a matrimonial interest in Amazigh-Kabyle women culture and through thematics such as listening, voice, border of speech, immemorial and intergenerational trauma. She has also a practice of improvisation through an electronic dispositive of no-input mixing board. She performed in les Instants Chavirés, le Non_Jazz, Doxa Esta and Cmptrmthmthcs.

https://soundcloud.com/sara-lhd-554471127

‘Immemorial Echoes’ is a co-commission between Radiophrenia and Kunstradio Radiokunst for Ö1, Austria.