Sunday 9 November 2025, 7.30pm
Youmna Saba (Beirut, 1984) is a musician, composer, and musicologist. She holds a Master’s degree in musicology from Antonine University, Lebanon. Her current research focuses on the relationship between electroacoustic music and the Arabic language in its sung form, as well as instrument and space resonances. These explorations manifest across her solo projects, collaborations, sound installations, and innovative experiments with digitally-augmented versions of her instrument, the oud.
Her fifth solo album, Wishah (2023), marks a transformative point in her career. Released by the UK-based label Touch, the album delves into the acoustic and emotional possibilities of a digitally-extended oud, a device developed as part of her research project, Taïma’. Wishah was conceived as a five-stage suite, blending voice, electronics, and oud to evoke themes of memory and transformation.
Saba's recent performances have brought Wishah to renowned festivals and venues such as Rewire (Netherlands), BRDCST (Belgium), the MAO Museum (Italy), and Lafayette Anticipations (France), among others. These appearances join her notable past performances at CTM Festival (Berlin), Éclat Festival (Stuttgart), and the Gugak Center (Seoul), as well as collaborations with artists like Kamilya Jubran and the Neue Vocalsolisten ensemble.
She was a resident artist at the Musée du Quai Branly (2022–2023), where her sound installation La Réserve des Non-Dits was exhibited. Other residencies include the INA-GRM (Paris), Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris), Césaré CNCM, and the Sharjah Art Foundation.
Artist & composer Allan Gilbert Balon was born in Les Abymes, Guadeloupe in 1986 and is now based in Créteil, in the Southeastern suburbs of Paris. Allan’s practice combines sculpture, composition & sound installations to explore themes of presence & intimacy.
Allan is the co-founder of **xyä édition©** with Uta Guan Hyë, has released music on Recital Program & Séance Centre and exhibited at New York’s MoMA PS1.
Allan’s debut album, The Magnesia Suite, begins with a submerged choral voice that reverberates closely amongst long held organ chords introducing a lo-fi patchwork waltz of home recorded pieces drawing together piano, reeds, percussion & echoed voices. An assemblage of private histories and memory, flowing lucidly in a coastal drift of dissolving lines between the outside environment and internal space.
An intimate air hangs over Allan’s craft. Private music that evokes something of Erik Satie’s furniture music. A sense of the overheard, slowed down ragtime piano rolls drifting from a parlour window; spliced tape & late night radio FM interference. Allan gives us an architecture of sound that recalls the spatial tensions of dissonance and warmth held in the piano chords of Thelonious Monk and minimalist reverence of Charlemagne Palestine & Alvin Curran with the unhurried, wandering poise of the piano works of Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou.
Quiet notes that bring to mind the late composer Talib Rasul Hakim’s reflections to accompany one of his own pieces as “atmospheres-of-sound floating above and around segments of moving silence”.
