Radwan Ghazi Links Up with Polish Duo BNNT on ‘A Faithful Daughter’

Lebanese-Canadian composer and musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Polish experimental duo BNNT come together on a collaborative EP, A Faithful Daughter. Released through Beirut-based Ruptured and Poland’s Instant Classic, the four-track record brings together Moumneh’s buzuk, modular synthesis and haunting vocals with BNNT’s percussion and electronics, building a slow-moving body of work that resists conventional ideas of progression and resolution.

Recorded across four days at Montréal’s Hotel2Tango in December 2018, the project emerged from the trio’s first meeting. Moumneh’s work with Jerusalem In My Heart has long explored the friction and dialogue between Arabic musical traditions and experimental sound. Meanwhile, BNNT’s Konrad Smoleński and Daniel Szwed bring their own cross-disciplinary practice into the room, with Smoleński on baritone missile and electronics, and Szwed on drums.

Rather than arranging its four compositions around obvious peaks, A Faithful Daughter moves through shifts in density, texture and pressure, unfolding at an unhurried pace. Its music sits somewhere between drone, electroacoustic composition and experimental rock, with each instrument functioning less as a lead voice than as part of an unstable sonic architecture.

That approach is established from the outset with ‘The Sad’, the album’s longest composition at just under eleven minutes. Its scale immediately signals that this is not music concerned with getting somewhere quickly. Across the record, duration becomes part of the composition itself: sounds have room to emerge, recede and alter the atmosphere around them rather than being pushed towards a conventional climax. ‘The Sad’ therefore works as an entry point into the album’s central logic, listening to small changes until they become the event.

‘Actual’, at just over five and a half minutes, is the album’s shortest piece and offers a more concentrated counterpart to the longer compositions surrounding it. Its title sits intriguingly against the album’s abstract sonic language, where nothing feels particularly fixed or literal. The accompanying text by Montréal writer Olivia Tapiero similarly approaches uncertainty rather than resolving it, circling hesitation, ruins, history and what remains after collapse. The writing is not presented as an explanation of the composition, but as another route into its atmosphere.

The ten-minute-plus ‘Meaning’ extends the album’s interest in suspension. Instead of treating meaning as something that arrives through a definitive musical gesture, the composition leaves space for it to accumulate gradually. This is central to A Faithful Daughter: its structures slowly reveal their internal relationships. The buzuk’s presence within the electronic and percussive framework becomes part of that tension, placing an instrument associated with a distinct musical lineage inside a much more abstract sonic environment.

Closing the record, ‘Mean Sine’ runs for just over nine minutes and brings the album back to its fascination with gradual transformation. The title itself gestures towards something mathematical and cyclical, but the music refuses the clean predictability that such a reference might suggest. Instead, the composition belongs to the same unsettled world as the rest of the record, where repetition, texture and changing frequencies become ways of moving through sound rather than arriving at a fixed conclusion.

Across the four pieces, Moumneh and BNNT avoid treating collaboration as a simple exchange between two established practices. The meeting is more porous than that. Moumneh’s buzuk and voice do not sit neatly on top of BNNT’s electronics and percussion; instead, the instruments become components within the same shifting field. A Faithful Daughter feels less like a meeting of contrasting sounds than an attempt to discover what those sounds can become when their usual boundaries are removed.

The album’s accompanying texts deepen this idea. Tapiero wrote four pieces in response to the compositions, approaching memory and what survives after rupture without attempting to translate the music into words. The relationship between the texts and compositions is therefore deliberately open-ended: one does not explain the other, but both circle the same questions of disappearance, aftermath and persistence.

Given the record’s history, that sense of persistence is particularly striking. Completed in 2018, A Faithful Daughter remained unreleased as circumstances in the artists’ lives and the wider world delayed its arrival. Yet the album does not present itself as a historical artefact. Its slow-moving drones, sparse shifts and unresolved structures give it a strangely present-tense quality, one that feels less interested in documenting a particular moment than in sitting with the uncertainty that survives it.