Frédéric D. Oberland, Grégory Dargent, Tony Elieh, Wassim Halal – SIHR

SIHR is a genre-blurring, cross-cultural sonic manifesto created by a post-genre quartet made up of multi-instrumentalists from the Mediterranean region. Featuring members of acclaimed experimental groups like Oiseaux-Tempête, H, Karkhana, and Polyphème, the project emerged from a series of improvised performances in Cairo, Beirut, and various European art spaces. Core members Frédéric D. Oberland and Grégory Dargent teamed up with Lebanese pioneers Tony Elieh and Wassim Halal to form a powerful and eclectic ensemble exploring music as ritual, resistance, and reinvention.

Recorded over three days in a bunker studio between Paris and Berlin, SIHR is a radical exploration of new folklore for a world in crisis. The music fuses acoustic and electric textures, weaving elements of trance, jazz, electronics, improvisation, maqam, and noise into a swirling, mystic tapestry. Their sessions—described as sound bacchanalia—are steeped in both ancestral memory and future-facing experimentation, reflecting a desire to rediscover music as a ceremonial, communal act.

With Benoit Bel (Zombie Zombie, Thurston Moore Group) capturing the sessions, the album becomes a vivid document of creative urgency and cultural entanglement. It’s a sonic testimony to hybridity, chaos, and possibility—a hallucinatory vision of music danced on the smoldering ruins of the present. Rooted in collaboration and improvisation, SIHR stands as both a farewell to fading traditions and an invocation of new ones yet to come.