Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an Indian award-winning sound and media artist, researcher and writer. Focusing on sound as a primary medium, Chattopadhyay’s large-scale installations deal with contemporary social and political issues such as the climate crisis, human intervention in the environment and ecology, urbanity, migration, and race. Conceptually, Chattopadhyay’s work enquires into the materiality, objecthood, site, and technological mediation of sound. His piece “Exile and Other Syndromes” was conceived during a residency at the Institute of Electronic Music in Graz, Austria, where a prototype was developed and premiered. The fuller version of the work is proposed at Irtijal, involving multichannel sound and live visuals.

Hailing from Kurdistan, Hardi Kurda is a composer, sound artist, improviser, and curator working with sounds of otherness, real-time score, and improvisation strategies. He develops interactive sound projects for public spaces within a range of disciplinary collaborations. He is currently developing his new sound composition “The Latest News” at Recherche Ensemble in Freiburg, Germany. Kurda is a curator at artist-run collective Space21, which develops and presents sound art exhibitions in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Shakeeb Abu Hamdan is an artist, musician and recording engineer living in Beirut. He has been heavily involved in the DIY music scenes of London and Leeds in the UK over the past 15 years, playing in various experimental rock/weird punk bands including Cleckhuddersfax, Please and Isambard Kingston Brunel; running Ouse, a recording studio and label; and organizing the Total Inertia Music festival. Recent performances and recordings have centered around the use of drums, collected metals, bells and cymbals augmented and amplifed with megaphones and other lo-tech electronics.

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 is a member of several Lebanese bands, including art-rock quintet The Incompetents, electronic duo Stress Distress, and most recently The Bunny Tylers, a duo with singer/guitarist Charbel Haber that veers between drone, electronics, post-rock and noise rock. In addition to his impressive production work with a vast array of Lebanese musicians, he also teaches sound courses at ALBA (Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts).

Christof Migone is a Swiss-born artist, performer, teacher, curator and writer who works with language, voice, bodies, intimacy, complicity, and endurance. He has collaborated with Lynda Gaudreau, Martin Tétreault, Alexandre St-Onge, Michel F. Côté, Set Fire To Flames and Fly Pan Am, among others. A book compiling his writings on sound art, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body was published in 2012. He is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University in London, Ontario, Canada.

Cherif El-Masri is a composer and multi-instrumentalist based in Cairo. He is equally at ease in various musical idioms, including Arabic classical and folk music, jazz, free improvisation, punk rock, extreme metal, and experimental electronic music. He has been an active member of several Cairene bands such as Eskenderella, Procession Towards the Unknown, and more recently Nadah El-Shazly’s touring band. In 2012 he joined The Invisible Hands, a psych folk/rock band co-founded with Alan Bishop of Sun City Girls fame. El-Masri’s “Tarkamt” solo project combines primitive analog electronics, electro-acoustic processes, visceral free improvisation and unclassifiable progressive composition, at times combined or juxtaposed with more traditional forms.

Aya Metwalli is a singer/songwriter from Cairo who has been performing her original material since November 2011. Starting solely with her acoustic guitar and voice, she gradually expanded her live set after studying music production in 2014. She self-released her first album, an EP entitled “Beitak”, in December 2016. Lately, she has been leaning towards the avant-pop genre, where she combines her guilty pleasure of the love of pop music and being inevitably influenced by it, and more experimental and eerie sonic excursions.

Stefan Fraunberger is an Austrian artist and composer exploring themes related to transformation and liminality in sound. He engages in an electro/acoustic dialogue with different instruments and conceptions through translation, composition, performance or writing. Focusing on schemes of perception, relating discontinuity of geometries and languages beyond nature and culture, his work touches on time, periphery, memory, and transience. Fraunberger has conducted research, residencies and studies in Aleppo, Sana’a, London, Tehran, Sibiu, Benares and Brussels. Since 2008, he has been undergoing sonic research in deserted Saxon churches in Central Transylvania, for his long-term project “Quellgeister“.

Thomas Ankersmit is a musician and sound artist based in Berlin. He plays the Serge Modular synthesizer, both live and in the studio, and has collaborated with artists such as Phill Niblock and Valerio Tricoli. His music combines intricate sonic detail and raw electric power, with an extremely physical and spatial experience of sound. Acoustic phenomena such as infrasound and otoacoustic emissions (sounds emanating from inside the head, generated by the ears themselves) play a central role in his work, as does a deliberate misuse of the equipment.

Lebanese-born producer and DJ Rabih Beaini specializes in grainy, imaginative analogue techno. As Morphosis, Beaini has been crafting away in the nether-regions of the techno underworld since the 90s. Having cut his teeth as a DJ, a move to Italy in 1996 proved to be the catalyst for various studio experimentations. Beaini’s genuine musical ability and range of influences —from krautrock to new wave— seep into his inventive, dark, and emotional productions and immersive DJ sets. These influences also find their way into Beani’s productions with The Upperground Orchestra, an improvisational ensemble that explores electronica, techno and free jazz.

With an academic background and technical expertise in music going back decades, Lebanese producer Stephanie Merchak’s first endeavors into the realm of electronic music came in the early 2000s. Since 2009, she has been working on bringing out her own touch of experimentalism, releasing tracks, EPs and full-length albums both independently and on various labels, and performing in and around Beirut. She relies on an array of synthesizers, samplers and effect pedals to craft deeply intricate live sets, heavy on bass drones, screeching feedback, and ghostly sound effects. Merchak is also a freelance sound editor, composer and sound designer in various Beirut studios.