Chimelike sounds and the whoosh of air—or perhaps the sea—“Ghyoum” open the first track on Youmna Saba’s 2014 album Njoum, before gentle strings enter to fill the spaces between the notes. The Lebanese singer, songwriter and composer’s third album is a gently unfolding narrative depicting the intimate relationship between the moon and the soul. When Saba arrived in South Korea in 2013 for an artist residency, she found herself removed from the urban hustle and bustle that was so familiar to her in her native Beirut. Held at a school that used to be a prison for the youth during the Japanese occupation, the residency felt haunted by history, and the eerie environment which left a mark on Saba.
Trying to come to grips with the distance, the difference, and the novelty of her new surroundings, Saba decided to challenge her compositional process, drawing on the wealth of knowledge she acquired while studying musicology in Beirut to lay down the building blocks for an album whose experimental edge marked a turning point in her discography.
Saba’s experiments with the oud push it beyond the expected, filtering its sounds through a bevy of effects and pedals. The strings of guitars and oud are intricately interwoven, their melodies looped together alongside different sounds collected during her residency. Together, they glow like the silver rays of the moon—the album’s central protagonist. An old legend in Korea states that the moon has the ability to make wishes come true, and Njoum tells the story of a relationship between a human and the moon, who ultimately forsakes the human. Saba started working on the album in 2013 around the time of Chuseok, a celebration of venerated local deities and ancestors in Korean culture.
Saba utilizes stillness carefully within the compositions, contrasting it with elaborate musical sentences. In the end, Njoum is a deep listening experience, one that offers the opportunity to contemplate the self, our surroundings, and the sensorial realm via its meditative instrumental compositions.
