Faten Kanaan

Faten Kanaan, a Brooklyn-based composer working in experimental electronic music, has forged a distinctive method centered on constructing live loops entirely by hand, without relying on samplers or sequencers. Active in New York’s electronic and synth communities from the late 2000s onward, she began issuing recordings in the 2010s and gained recognition for her dramatic, dark-hued projects The Botanist & the Archaeologist in 2016 and Foxes in 2018. By combining serene soundscapes with potent cinematic horror-film references, her work led to placement on the Fire Records roster for her fourth album, the 2020 release A Mythology of Circles, which was succeeded in 2023 by the mysterious and beguiling Afterpoem.

After relocating to New York for graduate studies, Kanaan became deeply integrated into the city’s experimental music environment. Drawn to classical and medieval traditions, she also developed a fascination with film scores—especially those built on analog synth foundations that employed sequencers and arpeggiators to generate repeating loops. Lacking familiarity with such devices at the time, she cultivated the skill of executing these passages manually in real time, a technique that has remained integral to her later compositions and stage performances. Her initial showcase of this bold aesthetic arrived with the 2015 cassette EP simply titled EP, followed a year later by the full-length The Botanist & the Archaeologist. Wintry and ethereal yet marked by weight and intermittent menace, her predominantly instrumental works sustained these qualities across the 2017 album Pleiade Hex 6 and the 2018 album Foxes.

A longstanding preoccupation with cyclical patterns has likewise anchored her output and formed the core of the mesmerizing 2020 album A Mythology of Circles, marking her debut with the British label Fire Records. Issued three years afterward, her fifth album extended the cyclical motifs of prior efforts while adopting a more playful and poignant character. Appearing in February 2023, Afterpoem’s evocative title, together with its music, evokes the transient quality of a poem’s meaning as it shifts between abstraction and clarity.