Jad Atoui - It Will Take Forever (2026)

"On first single 'Reaching Heart' you can hear connections to noise and drone, but also echoes of club music’s sonics – rumbling sub bass, broken-down rhythms. It’s going to be a brilliant album." – Peter Hollo, Utility Fog broadcast

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Beirut-based sound artist and improviser Jad Atoui returns with It Will Take Forever, a six-piece album built from live modular synthesis performances developed between 2023 and 2025. Moving through ambient noise and power electronics, the record channels states of pressure, exhaustion, rupture, and release into dense physical sound.

Composed, performed, and produced entirely by Atoui in Beirut, the album emerged during a prolonged period of instability and suspended time. Rather than treating sound as narrative or abstraction, It Will Take Forever approaches it as bodily experience through overwhelming low-end pressure, unstable textures, saturation, collapse, and moments of fragile stillness.

Developed through live performance contexts, these pieces were conceived to be experienced at high volume in physical space. The work draws from Atoui’s early relationship to rave culture and club sound, though rhythm here is dismantled and stretched into immersive walls of electronics, feedback, distortion, and drifting harmonic residue. What remains is intensity without release, endurance without fixed structure.

Across six extended compositions, from the slow-burning turbulence of “Pressure Dream” to the suspended dissolution of “Weather of Collapse,” Atoui examines how sound moves through the body once familiar forms disintegrate. The album occupies a space between deep listening, power electronics, free improvisation, and contemporary electro-acoustic composition.

Atoui has previously collaborated and performed with artists including John Zorn, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Chuck Bettis, and Tarek Atoui. He has also composed commissioned works for ensembles such as Yarn/Wire and Distractfold.