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Join us at Bar Laika on Wednesday, October 21 from 7pm for the fortieth edition of Playback with Solpara.

Lebanese-American musician Solpara moves between experimental music, club culture, and interdisciplinary performance. He began making music as a teenager in early-2000s New York, collaborating with Nicolas Jaar before relocating to Montreal, where he co-founded Booma Collective with Valentin Stip and Oren Ratowsky. After returning to New York in 2015, he released his debut solo EP on Jaar’s Other People imprint, followed by records on Quiet Time and Poland’s Brutaz. His debut album, Melancholy Sabotage, arrived in 2024 with Resident Advisor describing it as “undeniably chic post-punk.”

His most recent work has moved further into interdisciplinary performance and film through an ongoing collaboration with Lebanese-American dancer and experimental animator Cirrus Marlo Sauma (CalArts MFA 26’). Their work includes a series of collaborative performances and Opalescent, Sauma’s forthcoming film, for which Solpara created the soundtrack. His latest endeavor is the ongoing Nour Noir Bayt event series, bringing together SWANA artists through experimental music, techno, and live performance.

Playback is a series of informal listening events curated by Kamran Sadeghi where record labels, musicians, composers, and producers feature recordings from their catalog, and premiere album pre-releases, archives, and other rarities.