With more than a million people once again displaced from southern Lebanon under an intensified Israeli bombing campaign, a small network of Beirut musicians is reviving a fundraising model that proved effective during the last major occupatory assault on the country.
In the fall of 2023, organizers from the local Tunefork Studios and Beirut Synth Center mounted a rapid, improvised relief effort, releasing a compilation album that raised nearly $200,000 from the local and international music community. Operating out of Beirut Synth Center, they turned the space into a storage and distribution hub, purchasing mattresses and delivering them directly to displaced families across Beirut.
The Synth Center’s space has since closed, and many of the people who helped run the effort are no longer in the country, said Julia Sabra, a partner in Tunefork and the lead singer of local alternative band Postcards, in an interview. So when the war escalated again in early March, she said, they looked for a way to contribute to the aid effort without a physical presence. The result is a pair of compilation albums, Land02 and Land03, released on Bandcamp this week.
“This is the least we can do,” said Sabra. “It’s a very paralyzing situation.”
To put the records together, the team put out a call to artists they know in Beirut and the diaspora and gave them a week to send in their contributions. Lebanese artist Carla Aouad created the album artwork and graphic designer Josette Khalil took on the layout. All tracks on the records are unreleased — some pulled from archives, others put together in the past few days. The first album leans toward song-based material; the second is more ambient and experimental.
The lineup cuts across scenes and generations, from up-and-coming bands in Beirut’s punk and shoegaze circles to more established artists like Yasmine Hamdan.
Hamdan teamed up with oud player Oussama Abdelfattah to produce “Ams Entahayna,” or “We Ended Yesterday,” a sparsely produced ballad pieced together in the short time since the start of the escalated war. “The goodbyes were smiles soaked in tears at times, and at others, in remembrance,” Hamdan sings.
Other features include an unreleased track by 1990s-era indie band Scrambled Eggs, a pioneer of Lebanese alternative music; a B-side track called “The Crow” from Postcards’ most recent album Ripe; and an immersive composition of textured bouzouk loops from Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, previously known as Jerusalem in My Heart.
Proceeds will go to Beit Aam, a community space in Beirut’s Badaro neighborhood that has been funding and distributing basic supplies — such as mattresses, blankets, and baby formula — to displaced families across the city. In the absence of a coordinated state response, this kind of ad hoc mutual aid has become central to relief efforts.
Sabra said she hopes the funds they raise will feed directly into the network of groups at the front lines of emergency aid work.
“Last time, the international music community really came through,” Sabra said. “I hope that we can raise at least a few thousand dollars to contribute to the effort.”
Readers can listen to Land02 and Land03 and donate directly on Bandcamp.
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