“Beyond All Borderlines” – Nour Sokhon & Stefan Christoff (Ruptured Records)

By Sarah Teixeira St-Cyr

An aural document of memory, displacement, and belonging, Beyond All Borderlines stands as a poetic act of resistance. Released on Beirut’s independent Ruptured Records, the collaborative album from Berlin-based Lebanese artist Nour Sokhon and Montreal’s Stefan Christoff is a quietly radical gesture. Over the course of two 19-minute cassette sides, it invites the listener to dwell in the in-between: the sonic terrain where field recordings bleed into minimalist piano lines and fragments of personal and collective histories resound.

Recorded live in an intimate studio space at Morphine Raum, the album feels like a shared breath between two artists rooted in different geographies, united by a politics of listening. Sokhon’s sound is expansive and tactile—phones ringing, street noise, voices, tram wheels, ghostly reverberations—while Christoff’s piano moves like a steady, human pulse beneath it all. Their improvisational dialogue doesn’t seek resolution; instead, it opens space for contemplation and unresolved grief. This album ventures into the murkier depths of human emotion and experience using a mix of field recordings, spontaneous sound experimentation, and sparse piano to guide the way. This is music that doesn’t obscure its context, but rather sits with it.

Informed by Sokhon’s research project And who are we now?, the album carries with it the emotional gravity of forced migration and the longing for rootedness. The question “Where are you from?” reverberates not only through the sampled voices but through the album’s structure itself—each track a meditation on location and dislocation, proximity and distance.
Released as a limited run of 50 cassettes, Beyond All Borderlines carries a sense of intimacy and impermanence, echoing the fragility of memory and the physical care embedded in its production. Through layered soundscapes and improvised piano, the album conveys what it means to inhabit a place, to be torn from it, and to long for return. In its quietness, it offers moments of tenderness and resilience amid the chaos—something that feels increasingly urgent in a time marked by renewed imperial violence and cultural erasure, by hardened nationalisms and rising fascisms. Sokhon and Christoff remind us that sound can be a site of solidarity.

Beyond All Borderlines is available exclusively on cassette and digital via Ruptured Records’Bandcamp.

All proceeds go to support the artists and the Beirut-based label’s ongoing cultural work.