Joy Moughanni Explores War & Survival on ‘A Separation From Habit’

Lebanese musician, producer and sound engineer Joy Moughanni has recently unveiled his debut solo album, ‘A Separation From Habit’, on Ruptured Records. Over five tracks, Joy explores chronic war trauma, lost memories and emotional survival in his hometown through a collage of sampled archival tape recordings and electronics manipulation, merging ambient, distorted noise textures and experimental elements.

Initially created amidst the turbulent events of October 2024, ‘A Separation From Habit’ features archival recordings of the late Georges Tarazi from 1975 and 1985, which Moughanni repurposes to interrogate Lebanon’s ongoing crises. He crafts an evocative sonic dialogue between the present and past life in a country that’s perpetually on the edge, navigating the concept of post-war identity, and collective grief.

On the opening track, ‘The Voice I’ve Yet to Understand’, he dissects the complexities of collective memory, weaving archival radio debates from the 70s and 80s with traditional zajal poetry. The narrative shifts from personal expression to echoes of past generations, embodying the palpable tension between the voices of Moughanni’s ancestors and his own ever-changing sense of identity and personal history. 

One of the standout tracks on the ‘A Separation from Habit’ is ‘For A Moment, We Stopped to Listen’, the first track Joy recorded out of the entire tracklist, which set the tone for the album. Through improvised tape recordings, he captures the communal anxiety during wartime, painting pictures of neighbours rushing to their balconies, mistaking sounds of revving cars for airstrikes.

On ‘Of Color and Insignificance’, Moughanni reworks samples from a French cassette tape, titled ‘Lebanon in Colour’, manipulating its lush qanun melodies into distorted noise textures that are eerie and unsettling, offering an abstract representation of his own anger at the revoking hypocrisy of post-colonial power. Meanwhile, the ‘Interlude’ repurposes explosion recordings from 1978, collapsing past and present into a single moment, underscoring the reality of history repeating itself. 

The album concludes with ‘To Lose A Friend / A Separation from Habit’, where Joy confronts the inevitable reaction to trauma, which is emotional suppression, and the habitual detachment that people resort to as means to help them function amid crisis.