Founded in 2000, Irtijal is currently the oldest music festival of Beirut city. Its wide musical range includes experimental music, free jazz, free improvisation, contemporary music, noise and free rock as well as other forms of innovative music-making.
Irtijal 2026 unfolds over three days in Beirut as a focused exploration of voice, rupture, and reassembly. This edition brings together artists from Beirut, Cairo, Berlin, San Francisco and beyond to interrogate form, from syllabic poetry sounded as architecture, to Tarab reframed through free jazz and punk, to shaabi psychedelia, noise systems, and modular delirium.
Across solo resonance, collective improvisation, and radical reinterpretations of tradition, the festival traces how sound can stretch memory without abandoning it, how chaos can remain intentional, and how voices: spoken, sung, processed, fractured, continue to shape new sonic territories in the region and beyond.
In 2021, in collaboration with our partners at hcmf//, we launched ISTIMRAR, our first series of COMMISSIONED WORKS addressed to Lebanese musicians. The purpose of this series is to keep the creativity of Lebanese musicians alive and robust and to inject some stimulation into the Lebanese musical sector as a whole.