Serge Volant Holds Onto Calm Amid Lebanon's Turmoil on ‘Fine Feathers’
The Beirut composer finds beauty in the everyday on ‘Fine Feathers’, ahead of his debut album in August.
On his latest single ‘Fine Feathers’, the lead track off his forthcoming debut album Everyday Is All There Is, Beirut-based ambient composer and producer Serge Volant sets out to soundtrack his perspective on life in Lebanon. It’s one that looks out not from the vantage point of hardship and suffering, both of which continue to mount with the ongoing war, but from a cynically hopeful stance; immediate and focused on the small joys he still encounters day to day.
The track is a quiet meditation on the moments of peace that persist even in difficult times, albeit occasionally disturbed by abrupt sonic fluctuations that mirror the catastrophic disruptions war brings to everyday life in Beirut.
Built from modular synthesizers and field recordings captured across the city, the track opens with reversed chords that drift in pitch as they establish a bedding for the single. Airy pads soon join in, giving way to harp-like plucks and the distant liveliness of the field recordings. Unhurried and harmonically rich, chords slowly glide into one another with the occasional flourish before dissolving texturally into a disconcerting moment of anxiety, then returning to calm. Eventually, a lo-fi drum pulse settles in underneath, making for a pensive, absorbing listen that's perfect to get lost in thought to.
Volant has spoken about the difficulty of releasing music during a period of ongoing war and regional instability, repeatedly questioning the timing and the responsibility of the gesture before ultimately choosing to proceed, viewing the act of creation as resistance rather than escapism. Scheduled for release in August, Everyday Is All There Is offers a quiet reflection on the realities of daily life in Lebanon, without looking away from the conditions that produced it.
