Publications

Taking place at a pivotal time when a wave of new regional publications and emerging writers has appeared over the past few months, the workshop The Craft of Writing About Music & Sound offered a unique framework for sharing reflections on the many ways of writing about music, while laying the groundwork for a space where established music journalists and newcomers could meet and exchange, and do it in a constructive way. Far from being tied to mere inspiration or a specific profile, music journalism and criticism are crafts that can be learned and refined.

The workshop, which  took place in December 2025 and was hosted at the Arab Image Foundation aimed to build collaborate with and engage with collective knowledges, in addition to serving as a moment of reflection and feedback on everyone’s practices instigated by its two facilitators; Christina Hazboun and Pierre France, who shared years of layered experience both in working within and alongside artistic worlds, and in navigating relationships with press and publications, both digital and in print in meaningful, progressive and professional ways.

Above all, the workshop was conceived through an immersive, lived experience based spirit and included an immediate practical component through direct access to the festival itself: concerts, audience observation, interviews, backstage access — participants benefited from an expanded immersion into everything that Beirut and Beyond represented in its 2025 edition, charting their own path through it before receiving feedback from Christina Hazboun and Pierre France on their pieces.

What is to follow are unique pieces conceived by brilliant writers, who share their experiences and perspectives from a musical universe that seems distant now, yet by recalling it allows us to re-imagine, and thus imagine, times to come: In the next pages Cheri Choukeir interviews a pillar of the Lebanese scene, Charbel Haber, while Jana Bazzi speaks with the tireless Deena Abdelwahed, and Majd Shidiac moves beyond Beirut to explore the hip-hop scene in Tripoli. Last, but not least Yasmine Najji celebrates the audience and the singular atmosphere of a festival edition that remains, as always, adventurous, creative and unique.

– Introduction by Christina Hazboun and Pierre France