I recognize you from my sketches

Fadi Tabbal’s music has always been a dialogue. Since establishing Beirut’s Tunefork Studios in 2006, the Lebanese record producer and multi-instrumentalist has recorded countless records from the city’s independent music scene and played in bands ranging from prog rock to dream pop. Yet when it comes to his solo projects, he maintains that dialogue with himself, layering electric guitar and droning synths in an introspective cross between Stars of the Lid and Ultrafog. “It’s a conversation really, between who you are, who you could be/have been, and who you want to be,” he said in 2014 after releasing his first record. On his latest album, I recognize you from my sketches, Tabbal brings the scene he’s been so indispensable in building into his solo work, sampling his peers in his most texturally diverse record yet.

Tabbal’s fascination with sound came early, growing up with Lebanon’s inconsistent electrical grid, where the hum of household appliances would modulate alongside power surges to create an infrastructural orchestra that has stayed with him since. These influences bear themselves out in the low, pulsating whir of “(keep beating),” as synths stream overhead like rays of light in a dusty cathedral. While Tabbal’s previous albums made these mechanical textures musical by layering them with patient drones, he applies them here to new experiments in space, repetition, and rhythm: Listen to the swells of static between sparse metallic loops on “You were right,” or the shapeshifting buzz that seeps to the surface on “Oh heart, are you burning.”

I recognize you from my sketches alternates between distortion and clarity, as if outlining the contours of an internal debate. Tracks like “When we swam together!” and “All those nights” are remarkably limpid, glassy synth tones dappled with twinkling piano impressions that offer respite from anxious soundscapes like “(keep thumping).” These ruptures are intentional; after years of mediating between others, Tabbal seems to reflect on lofty dreams and missed potential in a city infamous for its contradictions. So when he says this is a “breakup album between who we want to be and who we turned out to be," the use of the plural “we” feels like an intentional slippage.

As such, his reworking of samples from Beirut contemporaries marks an important shift in Tabbal’s solo work. Though he’s an inveterate collaborator, Tabbal rarely features others in his desolate ambient compositions; 2020’s Subject to Potential Errors and Distortions, which featured the voice of Julia Sabra, was a rare exception but perhaps a harbinger. He brings in Sabra again here, alongside Charbel Haber, Sharif Sehnaoui, Pascal Semerdjian, Anthony Sahyoun, Marwan Tohme, and Ghassan Sahhab, but their contributions are difficult to trace; the repeated, ascending riff on “Absence or death” might be Ghassan Sahhab’s qanun, manipulated into a cascading wash of delay that sounds like a more organic version of Boris’s Flood.