Live Audio Essays: Air Pressure

Audio investigator Lawrence Abu Hamdan weaves together urgent political narratives that pivot around acoustic experience and sonic memory. Live Audio Essays presents three key performance works by Abu Hamdan, where sound and politics intersect. The performances present narratives and testimonies that detail violence, oppression and aggression, offering strategies for political critique and action.

Air Pressure (2021), the first of the performances, is a diaristic analysis written between May 2020 and May 2021 into the aerial soundscape of Lebanon where, from 2006–2021, there had been over 22,111 instances of Israeli fighter jet and drone violations in Lebanese airspace. Deploying publicly accessible information uploaded to the UN Digital Library, Abu Hamdan’s research and analysis brings this data together for the first time, making clear the scale and intensity of these incursions, and the consistent atmosphere of violence brought to bear across the territory.

Residents of Lebanon live in a state of precarity with the constant background noise of hostile jets and drones overhead. The potential of full-scale aerial bombardment is a daily possibility. Whether they are actively ignoring the noise from above or determined to document the violent aerial machines conspicuously hovering in the near distance, residents have developed modes of resistance.

Abu Hamdan’s account unfolds with live audio processing and countless videos of the rumbling sky, both pulled from open source content and captured by the artist and his team. Abu Hamdan employs the 'atmospheric' both aesthetically and conceptually to explore the ways in which violence is made manifest, reading Lebanon's air as a high pressure nexus in a global weather system.

Air Pressure is performed by Lawrence Abu Hamdan with live sound design by Moe Choucair. It has never previously been performed in the UK. With thanks to SWG3.

Further performances by Abu Hamdan include A Thousand White Plastic Chairs on Sunday 9 June at Audio, 14 Midland Street, G1 4PP; and After SFX on Sunday 23 June at Barrowlands, 244 Gallowgate, G4 0TT.