NP [Jad Atoui & Anthony Sahyoun] - Lattices (2021)

LATTICES, the first release from Lebanese electronic producers Jad Atoui and Anthony Sahyoun as NP, is concerned with the exploration of non-deterministic approaches to producing electronic music, based on improvised techniques using modular systems and synthesizers.

NP reflects on the current political transformation and its imposed uncertainties, as a method to explore musical futures. The project draws from both planetary and regional volatilities in the wake of the 2020 pandemic - where logistical, social and biological parameters were closely entangled with the disaster. The unforeseen became a tangible reality, which political systems rushed to temper, mitigate and rewire, along with its catastrophic probabilities.

Those realities are amplified locally in Lebanon, with a full scale, gradual collapse of all its systemic components, where intricacies of an unstable state have surfaced. In its musical realm, those observations are summed mathematically through concepts of non-determinism that the two musicians employed to build and connect electronic musical systems via modular synthesizers. The rhythm and harmonic content created by this system is un-gridded, devout of time signatures or a linear time consensus. It constantly behaves as non-deterministic, emitting unpredictable sound and musical elements that Atoui and Sahyoun tame by improvising with and around them, morphing the constructed musical instrument into a performative body, interacting with its automation and randomness.