Sphaîra by Sara Persico

Designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer between 1962 and 1967, the Rachid Karami International Fair in Tripoli is one of the ancient port city's most unique and unusual spectacles. The vast exhibition center was intended to draw around two million visitors a year, showcasing the country's cultural standing both in the Middle East and around the world, but it wasn't completed. When civil war broke out in 1975, construction ground to a halt and was never resumed, leaving the sea air to slowly dissolve the 18 abandoned concrete structures. The most impressive of these is the Experimental Theatre, a huge dome that Niemeyer intricately designed as a modern performance space; its acoustics produce an uncanny "whispering effect" that allows visitors standing on opposite sides of the building to hear each other clearly, no matter how softly they're speaking.

In October 2022, Berlin-based Italian sound artist and vocalist Sara Persico was visiting Beirut for a short tour, and took the time to head north to Tripoli and explore the UNESCO World Heritage site for herself. She was immediately awed by the dome's unique sonic characteristics, so made sure to pack her recording equipment when she returned to Lebanon a year later. Although the area is disused, there are still security checks on the entrance, so Persico had to justify her unofficial presence; thankfully, a friend from Beirut had been shooting footage in the dome a few days prior, so she was let in with her gear for an impromptu three-hour field recording session. She wanted to use the time to document the architecture's impulse response - the actual recorded atmosphere of the environment itself - and by singing, screaming, whispering, moving objects and producing sound with metal plates that hung from the roof of the structure, she sketched out every corner of the theatre. Additionally, Persico was able to chronicle the omnipresent hum of Tripoli from inside the dome, letting the space sublime the voices, vehicles and wildlife into ghostly overtones.

Persico presents these uncanny real-world textures on 'The Center Cannot Hold', the album's opening track, mingling her pebbly found sounds with vaporous birdsong that seeps in from the outside. Her voice appears for the first time on 'Brutal Threshold', forming wordless, breathy drones around corroded metallic scrapes and distant police sirens. It's as if Persico is communicating with not just the space, but with history - her processes are contemporary, but the elements themselves have been snatched from time. Traces of sacred music, folk and opera can be picked out from the layers of temporal interference, and accent a cultural conversation between Lebanon and the wider world that's still very much in progress. As she was shaping the samples, loops and percussive elements, assisted by Belgian sound designer Koenraad Ecker, Persico was struck by the richness of her recordings. "The deeper I went, the more I realized how this music had a special energy," she explains. "As I was stretching the samples, the sound was revealing more information and more details. Perhaps a place with history keeps more inside than we can perceive."

Voices evaporate like stifled conversations on 'Maze', dotting sibilances throughout the soundscape impressionistically, daubing Persico's spine-chilling canvas of echoes, gong-like chimes and subtle oscillations. And she even takes more risks on ‘Rashid Karami', introducing harsh industrial groans and asymmetrical rhythms that ink unfamiliar shapes on the dome's curved interior. A rumbling, dubwise thud appears through the choral ether on 'Kairos', and on 'Voices Organ,' Persico's staccato electronic plucks punctuate a muggy haze of meditative mantras. Each track examines the possibilities of the space's unique soundscape and also the role it still plays in Tripoli, as a monument to another era that still casts a shadow on the contemporary world. On '34°26’14”N 35°49’24”E', the call to prayer can just be made out from the burr of environmental sounds and Persico's own altered voice."I was just listening and feeling everything around me," she says. "The dome merges all the elements and creates order with it."

Sara Persico is a sound artist, composer and vocalist from Napoli, south of Italy.

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