In Cairo in 1944, Halim El-Dabh borrowed a wire recorder and took it to a Z?r ceremony, where women used chanting and percussion as part of a ritual practice. He did not treat the recording as a neutral document. Back at the Middle East Radio station, he transformed the captured sound and presented the resulting work, The Expression of Zaar, at a Cairo art gallery.
The piece has circulated under several related names, including Ta’abir al-Zaar, The Elements of Zaar and Wire Recorder Piece. That unstable naming is a reminder of how easily early electronic work can sit outside the history written around later studios and institutions. The recording existed, but the language used to place it within electronic music was still being formed.
The date unsettles the familiar European timeline of musique concrète. More interesting, though, is the artistic decision already present in El-Dabh’s experiment: a recording could be material rather than evidence. A voice could be filtered, reshaped and removed from ordinary duration without losing all connection to the body that produced it.
Electronic music histories often begin with a studio, an institution or a newly invented machine. This one begins with listening outside the studio, then returning with a sound whose cultural meaning could not be reduced to technique. The wire recorder did not create the idea. It made another way of handling the idea possible.
https://brahms.ircam.fr/en/composer/halim-el-dabh/biography
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