Words and artworks by Ahmed Alawadhi
This piece is part of the “Frenquencies” issue
⚠️: This piece features a video with flashing lights that may provoke photosensitive seizures.
Ahlam’s Fedwat Oyounak on repeat. Part 1, Part 2. It’s Aquarius season.
There’s no improvisation, prayers only. It isn’t in the music as much as in the poetry.
.“أسولف للجدي عنك ويشعر بالجروح سهيل”
Language here is a manifestation, a vessel for culture delivered and received through sound.
Discord listening party with my Gemini cousin whilst playing League of Legends.
We game together, referencing a lyric of a song. Unsure of which song it refers to, we laugh, knowing that our soundscapes collide to construct our collective world.
World building through the construction of inside jokes.
Culture, language, and soundscapes intersect yet remain separate. An inside joke is a tool that both constructs concepts and reels us closer together. The intersection is a space to spontaneously reference and have joy in real time world building. The obscure becomes hilarious, contextualized by its affiliates.
It’s personal and perceptual. This space forms referential spontaneity that infuses multiple cultures. We are born into cultures, and come to others through interactions and engagements. Arab cultures – with their own linguistic, artistic, musical, geographic, religious, philosophic, epistemological elements – transform, accommodating whoever they embody. It’s contextualized by time and place, the when and the where. It wasn’t in the early 2000s when Bluetooth reigned supreme, when the visual and sonic reformulated a new digital world. Nor was it in the trenches of the BlackBerry Messenger metaverse of the 2010s. It was closer to the 2020s pandemic season, when we lived on PC screens, zooming, apart yet together.
Nujoom by Ahmed Alawadhi