Name: Charbel Haber
Nationality: Lebanese  
Occupation: Composer, sound artist, songwriter, performer, visual artist
Recent release: Charbel Haber's A Common Misunderstanding Of The Speed Of Light, which combines images, texts, and tunes to document the aftermath of the Beirut explosion, is out via Other People.
Recommendations: Black Woman by Sonny Sharrock; Rings Of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

If you enjoyed this interview with Charbel Haber and would like to find out more about his music, visit him on Instagram, Facebook, and Soundcloud. He also has a personal bandcamp account.



When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it?

I started playing guitar as a teenager after discovering Nirvana’s Nevermind, around 1994. Then came Sonic Youth, Glenn Branca and post-punk. But my first encounter with the sounds of an electric guitar came at a much earlier age through the music of Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, my parents were huge fans.



Surf, punk and grunge, and ambient music, that’s mainly my musical DNA. Leonard Cohen, Nick Drake and Georges Wassouf can also be added to the mix.



I was quite an eccentric kid, especially compared to the other kids I grew up with. Music helped me deal with that, and it helped others understand me, and it helped me communicate with others.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening and how does it influence your approach to creativity?

Goose bumps, this is definitely what happens when I hear a track that moves me. Goose bumps don’t lie. I feel that I’m underwater, I can breath and I’m warm, I can visit the abyss, I can even see through darkness, and in this darkness I feel at peace.

How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?

First, like everyone before me, I wanted to change the world. So I was pissed off at the start, and so was my music.

After many failed attempts to change anything, I got angrier, so I started making noise and free form music to shut the world down, which also didn’t work. But all this time I was also very chilled, cause I smoke a lot, so my music would switch from anger to psychedelic wanderings. Then came melancholia, you can guess how my music was affected.

The challenge through all these phases was to keep on doing what I do (I don’t know what I really do, but I do it), in a world that despises poetry and reveres cruelty.

Tell me a bit about your sense of identity and how it influences both your preferences as a listener and your creativity as an artist, please.

I wish I could have a simple straight answer to this question in particular. But I don’t. I’m a Long Island cocktail drink. I wish I was a straight wiskhy on the rocks, an arak, a beer, a shot of tequila, but I’m not. I’m a Long Island cocktail drink.

Now that being said, this cocktail identity has allowed me to belong to many musical and artistic identities while really belonging to none. It’s very liberating. There’s a lot of freedom in that. I could absorb anything without questioning if it’s adequate for me in identity terms.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and art?

Melancolia and the fact that I will never come to terms with death.

How would you describe your views on topics like originality and innovation versus perfection and timelessness in music? Are you interested in a “music of the future” or “continuing a tradition”?

I don’t concern myself with these questions, I leave them for academics and musicians / researchers. I love to listen to them talk about where we came from musically and where we might be heading, what we should keep alive and what should whither and die away and vanish completely from collective memory, I learn a lot.

But me, I just tell stories, some from the past, some from the future, never from the present.

Over the course of your development, what have been your most important instruments and tools - and what are the most promising strategies for working with them?

All my work is ultimately centered around the electric guitar. That's my thing. I like to play it and to process any sound that comes out of it, especially the buzzing and the humming.

All this goes through effect pedals, they look like toys and make work less cruel. They allow me to be myself, a child prentending to be an adult. They also permit a sort of feeling of that timeleness where tradition and the future get lost.

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

I wake up, smoke and have tea. Then I head to my usual spot, a coffee place in my street. It’s a nice walk, I enjoy the light.

After coffee I head to the studio. The walk that way is even more enjoyable. On my way there I cross a bridge that goes on top of an imaginary river called the Beirut river, I go through a ghetto then arrive at Tunefork studio, a sanctuary in the heart of madness. I smoke again and then I start recording.

Then I walk back home when the sun is setting next to the cranes of the Beirut port, you can watch this magical spectacle from the bridge I mentioned before.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

I start with words, I dream of words, then I start playing. I create patterns, I repeat those patterns, memorize them, then repeat them again, like a machine that knows that it could feel things but it still doesn’t, until the moment it does, and this is when I have the piece I’m composing.

I record all of this. I record all the time.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I like both. I lack discipline, so I have to admit that I like the collaborative work more than the solo work. But you have to find the right partners of course.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

I feel and would like my work to mirror the sweet sadness of the world, and not try to cure or transform it.

Music should help society accept with serenity, even if in tears, the fleeting nature of our existence.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

Romain Gary wrote, “L’humour est une déclaration de dignité, une affirmation de la supériorité de l’homme sur ce qui lui arrive.” (“Humor is a declaration of dignity, an affirmation of man’s superiority over what happens to him.”) Music is also a deceleration of dignity and an affirmation of man’s superiority over what happens to him.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?  

Science could help music a lot in the necessary process of  constant rejuvenation. Music can reinvent itself indefinitely through technological innovations that come from science. And also science explains how music affects us, but I don’t like to dwell on that.

Sometimes I don’t want to know how, I just want to feel.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

It’s all the same for me, situations that should be explored and lived. In the mundane I bargain, on stage or in the studio I don’t.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I don’t. It’s a mystery for me and I would like to keep it that way.