In the face of collapse and horror, Charbel Haber turned toward his music for clarity and solace. The Lebanese musician, now in Paris, has such a deep connection to his home, but being geographically removed allowed for a different kind of perspective. Days moved slower. Times were quieter, calmer. This became a foundation for gentler sonic blueprints, where moments of tenderness moved from the margins to the center. Echoes from those strong tendrils still connected to Beirut emanate from the middle ground, and are ever-present on May a soft sun bless your sky while you wait for the inevitable (what a beautiful title it is). Haber likens these aural forms to a prayer, an attachment to forces greater than our understanding that seep into the world through vehicles like music and sound. The album carries that weight comfortably while never leaving it behind.
May a soft sun bless your sky while you wait for the inevitable is OUT NOW on the great Ruptured Records.
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What are some of your earliest sound memories? Is there something that stuck with you from when you were younger?
Probably the guitar of Omar Khorshid. My parents were big fans, so his music was constantly playing at home when I was growing up. There was something cosmic and cinematic about his guitar playing that stayed with me very early on — the way it could feel both melancholic and ecstatic at the same time. I think that tension has followed me ever since.
And how did you find your way into playing and making music? Were there specific artists or records that made you feel like this was a world you needed to be a part of?
It was Nevermind. Hearing that record completely changed something in me and made me pick up the guitar. There was an immediacy and emotional force to it that felt transformative. It made music feel less like entertainment and more like a necessity, a language capable of carrying confusion, rage, and fragility, all at once.
I’ve listened to May a Soft Sun Bless Your Sky While You Wait for the Inevitable a lot, and I keep getting more out of it. The title has this duality to it: a kind of blessing and an acknowledgment of dread. How did that phrase come to you, and what did it mean to you in the context of leaving Beirut?
While recording the album, I had a simple routine: long walks around Paris between morning and afternoon sessions. During these walks, it slowly began to feel as if I had come to Paris to wait for something — the inevitable, the collapse of everything, maybe even the collapse of civilization itself. There was a strange calm in accepting that feeling.
The title came from that contradiction: acknowledging catastrophe while still wishing for tenderness, warmth, light. The “soft sun” became almost a prayer for gentleness before the inevitable arrives, whether that inevitability is personal death or collective collapse.
There’s this great description of wanting to find gentleness despite the horrors of the world. I’m curious how you hold that as a working artist right now, with everything happening in Lebanon. Does making music feel like resistance? Or even some kind of refuge, if not something else entirely?
Music is a balm for the soul, but also something larger than us — almost the voice of the cosmos itself. That goes beyond the idea of resistance. Resistance feels insufficient against the scale and appetite of the war machine and its endless production of destruction.
I think what we can do is endure, remain human, and continue listening while the system slowly collapses under its own contradictions, like a snake eating itself. What happened in Gaza and what continues to happen in Lebanon feel like early symptoms of a much deeper fracture in the current world order. Music cannot stop that, but it can create moments of clarity, communion, and grace inside the collapse.
The situation in Beirut and Lebanon has been unrelenting. How has it affected your sense of what music is for? And has being in Paris changed the way you relate to what’s happening there, emotionally or creatively?
Being in Paris calmed my senses in a way Beirut no longer could. The music became more fluid, more continuous. In Beirut, interruption became part of daily life — psychological, political, and physical interruptions. Here, I found longer stretches of silence and concentration.
That changed the movement of the music. It breathes differently. But emotionally, the distance doesn’t erase anything. I think a certain sadness traveled with me from Beirut to Paris, a kind of endless melancholia I grew up with.
Determination and resilience are words that come up around this record, but the music itself has a certain softness to it. It feels quite vulnerable to me. How do those things coexist for you in the actual process of making something?
For me, the music on this record is deeply stoic — emotionally charged, but accepting of contradiction. It tries to hold together fragility and endurance at the same time.
The human condition is paradoxical: full of beauty and failure, hope and collapse simultaneously. I think the softness of the record comes from accepting that tension instead of fighting it.
That Rilke quote (“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”) interestingly sits underneath the music. Was that a text you’d been thinking about for a while, or did it come to you during the making of the record?
I discovered Rainer Maria Rilke in my twenties, but I think I only truly understood him in my late thirties. That sentence became a kind of mantra for me — a reminder to keep moving through even the darkest moments.
It naturally resurfaced while talking about this record because it perfectly reflects its emotional landscape: beauty and terror existing simultaneously, neither canceling the other.
Paris is central to how this album came alive, while so much of your solo work is shaped by life in Beirut. What does it feel like to make music so openly in conversation with a different place? Did the city change how you listened to yourself?
I know for certain I couldn’t have made this record in Beirut. There were too many ruptures there, and the bubble I had built for myself burst in 2020.
If you compare this album to A Common Misunderstanding of the Speed of Light, which I made in Beirut between 2020 and 2022, you can really hear the difference between the two cities. One record feels fractured, interrupted, heavy; the other feels more ethereal, lighter, almost suspended outside time. But both remain deeply melancholic. I think that sadness came with me from Beirut to Paris.
Your guitar, the looper pedals, and modular rig you work with are fairly minimal tools, but the music feels orchestral in places. How do you think about building that kind of scope from such a constrained setup? Is there a point where a piece tells you it has enough layers?
The minimal setup and the grandness of the result feel like a metaphor for the little means we have when faced with the tragedy of the human condition.
The loops evolve constantly rather than simply repeat, and their transformations guide the composition. The layers slowly build into almost orchestral textures, but they’re always on the verge of dissolving. That fragile balance usually tells me when a piece has reached its final form.
The album bookends itself with “This show starts in the future” and “This show ends in the past.” That’s such a striking way to structure the record. What does it mean to frame an album that way?
I framed the album that way because I think of the universe as cyclical rather than linear. Time feels recursive to me — beginnings already contain endings, and endings constantly reshape beginnings.
The record moves through that circularity, where the future and the past slowly collapse into each other.
What surprised you the most about writing and making this album?
That it started almost as an exercise and slowly became a prayer.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
The sound of a swimming pool on a summer day — distant voices, water moving, wind, echoes. There’s something eternal and deeply peaceful about it.
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