LISTENING TIP JULY 2026: “ Fake Live in America – Sawt”
- Natalie Peters
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Mazen Kerbaj, Michael Vorfeld, Burkhard Beins Release: 1. August 2025 Produced by: Headache Production
I’ve wanted for a long time to introduce the music of Mazen Kerbaj. I had originally been thinking more of his solo work. Then I came across this recording, which immediately caught my attention with its title and its charming cover image.
Kerbaj has also deeply impressed me as a visual artist. His project “Gaza in My Phone” touches one of the most sensitive points of our present moment. It is about Gaza, about helplessness and the senseless escalation of violence – but also about how we perceive violence in the first place and how it becomes visible on the smartphone, while at the same time being dehumanized and disempowered. After seeing his drawings, one cannot help but wonder why blood isn't dripping from our phones.
But Kerbaj is not only a visual artist. As one of the defining figures of Beirut’s experimental scene, he has been living in Berlin for many years. There he plays his trumpet, develops artistic projects, and continuously creates social and cultural contexts as an organizer.
In this Listening Tip, it is about music. But this record is also about the question of how reality is produced: through media, through documentation, and ultimately through our perception.
Kerbaj plays here together with Michael Vorfeld and Burkhard Beins. Trumpet and two drummers. The record consists of a montage of live recordings from their US tour. The recording quality ranges from professional multi-track captures to smartphone recordings. The result is a collage: a live concert that never actually existed, yet was fully played and crafted into something tangible.
The three pieces are:
Way In
Don’t Block the Box
Way Out
The whole thing about the “box” is a tricky matter. If you don’t accept that you are inside it, you usually remain trapped. And since we are constantly inside some kind of box, it feels rather friendly of a band to at least mark entry and exit points. Into the box, out of the box, but always Sawt Out. I looked it up: a mix of Arabic and English, roughly meaning “sound out.” Yes. I like that. Let it out.
The music lives up to the concept. I was completely captivated by how many dimensions appear simultaneously in this playing: piercing and subtle, intimate and vast, all at once. These are relaxed time-wizards whose aesthetic emerges precisely where you cannot hold it down, but have to let it go.
In a wink there is love for detail, but also devotion to this idiosyncratic trip that permeates and drives the artists. The music gets under the skin. It is playful and intense at the same time, working with constantly shifting fields of tension. The trio creates such a rich sonic world that it can at times feel almost symphonic, were it not for the incredible clarity of all involved, who with a single minimalist gesture suddenly focus everything into one point, only to open the space wide again in the next moment.
This is the magic I love in improvised music: when everything makes sense, and yet could at any moment be something entirely different.
In my opinion, this “fake” moves through the speakers as convincingly as a certified live album. Only that it also quietly asks where exactly you are in it.
In a way, Dalí’s melting clocks come to mind. Time passes as it wants. In the end, all that remains is what you have experienced and even that only in the quality of your own capacity to absorb things, not that of any recording device.
And since our capacity for perception is everything, we should keep practicing listening.
Even when it is uncomfortable. Especially then. That is why I also allow myself to once again point to “Gaza in My Phone.” Because this is not a moment in which we can put our nervous systems on ice. It is dangerous.
I recently overheard at a gas station a man filling up his expensive SUV saying his lightly dressed companion: “Oh, it’s so expensive. This fucking war.”
As I put the fuel nozzle into my car, I had the unsettling feeling that something red might come pouring out.
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