Artist Residency, Symo Reyn

Composer and sound artist Symo Reyn is undertaking a residency at The Grange, Norfolk.

June 2025

Symo Reyn live performance. Photo credit: IMA/Alice Sidoli

The Foundation for Art & Psychoanalysis, in collaboration with Grange Projects is pleased to be supporting an artistic residency by Symo Reyn, a Franco-Jordanian composer, sound artist and electroacoustic qanun player, at The Grange, Norfolk, UK.

During his residency at Grange Projects, Symo Reyn will work on a part of his upcoming album, entitled Et si on commençait à la toute fin? (What if we started at the very end?).

Et si on commençait à la toute fin? explores our relationship with imbalance and disproportion, echoing the social, intimate, and collective tensions that shape our lives. Ren’s aim is to create an eccentric album that challenges listening norms in order to reveal alterities and marginalized existences.

Symo Reyn commented “It is an album of contemporary musical and sound works. The natural surroundings of the Grange Projects will provide a fertile ground for experimenting with sounds from wildlife. This project is at the intersection of the intimate and the collective, between memory of place and sonic fiction, between heritage, development, and invention.”

About Symo Reyn

Symo Reyn holding the qanun. Photo credit: @5thhouseimagery

Symo Reyn is a Franco-Jordanian composer, sound artist, and electroacoustic qanun* player. He lives and works in Paris since 2007. He began playing the qanun at the age of five and, as a teenager, took part in international music meetings in the Middle East. Inspired by Western musicians, he developed new techniques to reinvent the instrument early on. After moving to France, he turned toward cinema and studied composition with Bernard Cavanna, then with Patrice Mestral at the École Normale de Musique de Paris, earning a degree in film scoring.

He collaborated with artists from diverse backgrounds, including Florient Azoulay, Abed Azrié, Estrella Morente, Laurent Goldring, and Alice Zeniter, among others. He performed in various venues such as the Opéra de Lyon, the Institut du monde arabe in Paris, the British Library in London, Bozar Brussels, the Fès Festival of World Sacred Music, the Comédie de Valence, the Mucem in Marseille, and the Villa Medici.

Driven by a desire for universality, he explores new dimensions of the qanun. Drawing from the techniques of other instruments, he transforms the playing and sound of this centuries-old zither, long associated with traditional music. This approach is central to his solo album A Time Between Birth and Chaos, where the instrument is reimagined and played in an electroacoustic way, using a custom-designed sensor he developed to extend the qanun’s sonic possibilities.

His music, shaped by multiple identities, plays with contrast and draws from diverse realms such as science fiction, jazz, psychedelia, minimal, and contemporary music.

*The qanun, whose name comes from the Arabic word for “law, order, rule,” likely descends from the ancient Mesopotamian harp. Considered an ancestor of the harpsichord, it is a plucked zither widely played across the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and Southwest Asia. Its earliest known mention appears in the Tales from One Thousand and One Nights, dating from the 10th century.