Omar Fakhry

Omar Fakhry is a Berlin-based sound designer building scores for film and installation almost entirely from field recordings — street sound, kitchen noise, half-heard radio — rather than composed instrumentation. Much of the source material comes from the Levant and from Levantine households in his own diaspora city, treated as material to be layered and scored rather than sampled for texture.

Practice

A commission usually starts with weeks of recording before any scoring begins — the sound of a specific street, kitchen, or crowd, gathered on location rather than pulled from a library. Scores are then built by layering and processing that material rather than writing melody over it, so a finished piece stays recognizably tied to the place it came from. Live scoring work runs on a modular synth patched directly against the recordings, improvised against the picture rather than fixed in advance.

Commissions

Recent work includes the score for a documentary following a Damascus water-carrier family resettled in Berlin, a four-channel sound installation for a Berlin group exhibition on diaspora domestic space built entirely from in-home recordings, and a live-scored screening of a restored 1960s Beirut silent short performed once, improvised rather than repeated.