Nancy Mounir – a Cairo-based composer, musician, and producer – and Lebanese-Amsterdam-based musician and artist ghenwa (noiré) abou fayad come together for a collective listening session rooted in archival practice and live experimentation. Encompassing conversation and improvised performance, the session explores vocal traditions and sound histories that have been fragmented, suppressed, or left undocumented.

The two artists guide the audience through an active listening process that shifts between archival material from the Levantine region and live sonic intervention. Mounir introduces her approach to archiving through her research into non-intrusive harmony and the sound materials that inform her album Nozhet El Nofous (2022). The project engages with early twentieth-century Egyptian vocal practices, attuning to the spectral traces of once-celebrated singers and the historical conditions that shaped their disappearance from the record.

Working through improvisation, ghenwa (noiré) abou fayad draws on personal influences alongside collective research developed during Sonic Acts’ Voice as Legacy: Tracing the Unwritten workshop in 2025. The workshop focused on the legacies of Egyptian singer and activist Mounira El Mahdiyya (1885–1965) and electronic music composer Halim El-Dabh (1921–2017), foregrounding the voice as a site of transmission, resistance, and transformation.

Rather than treating the archive as fixed or complete, this listening session approaches it as something activated in the present. Through sound, memory, and improvisation, the artists open a space where overlooked or erased narratives can be re-encountered – allowing past and future to fold into one another.