Bana Haffar - Ancient Future (2026)

Using her modular rig to manipulate a litany of samples and generate labyrinthine oscillations, Bana Haffar follows 'intimaa'' with a voyage across the past, present and future, scraping cultural traces into a complex, fragmented narrative.

Opening the album with what sounds like a garbled radio transmission, Haffar immediately gets down to business on 'Sun Dog', laying down a dense tangle of chopped oud patterns before diverting the flow with her cascading synth arpeggios and psychotropic portamento wiggles. She makes a salient connection between ecstatic music of the past and the new age ecstasy that guided the kosmische set as they probed "Eastern" philosophies and alternative lifestyles in the 1970s. And across the record, it's these links - "interconnected sound matter" that "moves between islands of respite in a sea of incomprehensibility" - that guide her, not any particular sound or genre.

Precise, experimental sound design and complex rhythms provide the backbone for 'Babylon Chop' and even here, Haffar finds a way to pull back to another time zone, introducing string sounds that hark back to the romantic era and cutting in dialog snippets that muddy the picture even further. She offers us a breather on 'The Beginning of the River' with dense, harmonic drones and hits her stride on 'The Concrete Ventures of Long Daydreaming', sailing a live hand drum rhythm into a reflecting pool of echoing, ritualistic abstraction.