This mix is a personal offering, curated for Worldwide FM as a guest selection and composed entirely of music released on Ruptured Records—a label I co-founded in Beirut in 2008 with Fadi Tabbal of Tunefork Studios, and have been nurturing ever since through radio, live performance, and a growing catalogue of experimental sound.
For over fifteen years, Ruptured has worked at the margins of genre and geography, sustaining a space for independent music-making in a country repeatedly brought to the edge. It has become a platform for artists whose practices emerge from a landscape of political violence, cultural erasure, and infrastructural collapse—yet whose works resist despair, insisting instead on complexity, collaboration, and sonic care.
This mix is not a chronology, but a movement through textures, tones, and tensions: ambient gestures, spectral folk, raw electronics, improvised structures. Featuring Yara Asmar, Munma, Sandy Chamoun, Nour Sokhon, Fadi Tabbal, Julia Sabra, Two or The Dragon, and others, it’s a reflection of the label’s community—a loose constellation of musicians whose work testifies to the conditions of making art amid loss, displacement, and ongoing struggle.
Broadcast via Worldwide FM, a station that has long championed music across borders and forms, this mix joins a lineage of radio as resistance: sound as testimony, as gathering, as memory held in air. Ruptured’s work has never aimed to transcend the present moment, but to stay with it—to carve room for unruly joy, for grief, for presence, and for futures not yet fully imagined.
Ziad Nawfal, 13 July 2025