One Self-Funded Week in Beirut. A Year Later, Beirut Came to Cairo.

In July 2024 I took a residency to KED Beirut and ran the whole budget myself, fully WRST-funded.

The Mass Production Beirut edition was the performance at the centre of it. One trip, two halves: the show the audience saw, and the week of work around it that nobody was paying for.

The week ran in collaboration with Milq Records, which is how El Rass came into it: a performance, a scavenger hunt for samples through his cassette archive, and a jamming session shot by Solo Films. It was delivered during a period of rising precarity, weeks before the escalation that hit Beirut later that year. No release came out of it, and I would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.

The bet

Show up before you are invited.

Regional relationships in this industry are usually built at conferences, through introductions, on the assumption that someone else carries the risk. I wanted to be in Beirut making something, in a week when almost nobody was going to Beirut to make anything, and to fund it myself rather than wait for a partner to underwrite it.

What happened

I went back to Beirut that September, invited to speak on regional residencies at Music Talks 01 alongside Edwin Harb of MDLBEAST Records.

Then it reversed. In spring 2025 we hosted Beirut & Beyond Music Festival’s own residency in Cairo, under the MASAR programme funded by the French Institute. BBMF brought the participants and chose the mentor, Deena AbdelWahed. WRST supplied the production, the venue and the technical studios, brought in visiting mentors, and co-ran the closing ceremony. SceneNoise covered it as Beirut and Beyond’s first music production residency in Egypt.

A year after going to Beirut at my own expense, Beirut chose Cairo, and chose us to run it.