September 10, 2026
Arraymusic is pleased to announce that Palestinian-Canadian composer, pianist and interdisciplinary artist John Kameel Farah will join our artistic team as curator of Sonic Archaeology, a new three-year concert series beginning in the 2026–27 season.
Across six concerts, Sonic Archaeology will bring together musicians whose work moves freely across musical traditions, technologies and histories—embracing original creation, live electronics, extended techniques, improvisation, non-Western modal systems and reinterpretations of Early Music. With a particular interest in artists connected to West Asia, North Africa and the Global South, the series steps outside rigid divisions between classical, experimental, electronic and culturally rooted musical practices.
The series will also foreground composer-performers whose creative practices are informed by a strong ethical consciousness and engagement with the world around them. The music need not be explicitly political; rather, ideas of global solidarity, social justice and human dignity form part of the context from which the work emerges. Through improvisation, electroacoustic experimentation and cross-cultural dialogue, Sonic Archaeology explores how musical innovation can emerge from both looking backward and listening outward.
A Natural Fit for Sonic Archaeology
Farah’s own artistic practice embodies many of the ideas at the heart of the series.
Drawing on Baroque and Early Music, improvisation, Middle Eastern musical traditions and electronic music, Farah has developed a distinctive musical language in which acoustic piano sits alongside synthesizers, computer processing, loops and electronic effects. He moves fluidly between composed material, improvisation and contrasting musical systems—an approach he has playfully described as “Baroque-Mid-Eastern-Cyberpunk.”
Toronto audiences recently encountered another dimension of that practice at Arraymusic. In January 2026, Farah joined the Array Ensemble for the premiere of his Arraymusic-commissioned By The Side Of The Road, a work reflecting on Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba of 1948 and the physical traces of those communities that remain in the landscape today.
That intersection of musical exploration, history, cultural memory and engagement with the contemporary world offers a natural point of departure for Sonic Archaeology.
About John Kameel Farah
Born near Toronto to Palestinian parents, Farah studied piano and composition at the University of Toronto, where he twice received the Glenn Gould Composition Award. He later studied privately with pioneering minimalist composer Terry Riley and attended the Arabic Music Retreat in the United States.
His career has moved across disciplines and musical worlds. Farah has created music for ensembles, film and dance, including collaborations with celebrated Canadian choreographer Peggy Baker, and worked with astrophysicist John Dubinski on Gravitas, pairing music with visualizations of galaxy formation and collision. He has also performed as a member of the Canadian Electronic Ensemble and, in 2023, appeared as a guest artist with electronic music pioneers Tangerine Dream.
Farah performs internationally, with appearances at venues including Berlin’s Volksbühne and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Kölner Philharmonie, London’s Sadler’s Wells, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and the Berlin Philharmonie. In 2023, he was also a recipient of the Johanna Metcalf Award for the Performing Arts.
A visual artist as well as a musician, Farah creates intricate ink drawings inspired by astronomy, sound waves and Near Eastern history and mythology, sometimes incorporating them into his performances through live projection.
With Sonic Archaeology, Farah brings this wide-ranging curiosity to the curator’s role—inviting audiences to encounter artists who draw on musical histories without being constrained by them, and whose experiments in sound remain deeply connected to culture, place and the world in which we live.
Watch for details of the first Sonic Archaeology concerts as Arraymusic’s 2026–27 season unfolds.