Some records try to address history, which usually means polishing it into something digestible. "Chronicles from the Arab Cold War" refuses that courtesy. It doesn’t interpret events so much as stand uncomfortably close to them, like a witness who isn’t sure whether speaking will clarify anything or just make the silence heavier.

Behind Pharoah Chromium is Ghazi Barakat, a figure who has long treated sound as both archive and intervention. His earlier works already circled themes of displacement and memory, but here the approach tightens: fewer gestures, sharper edges, less distance between material and implication.

The album’s construction is deceptively simple. Flutes, EWI, rhythmic patterns that echo belly dance traditions, and - crucially - voices sourced from a 1970s Omani revolutionary record. That last element could easily slip into the realm of aestheticized politics, the kind that borrows history as texture. Barakat avoids that trap by letting the voices remain stubbornly themselves. They don’t blend seamlessly. They insist.

Side A opens with a strange, almost disarming clarity. The children’s voices - light, collective, carrying something that resembles hope without announcing it - interact with the instrumental layers in a way that feels suspended between eras. There’s a temporal dislocation at play: 1970s revolutionary chants reframed within a present marked by ongoing violence. The dedication to the children of Gaza is not expressed through documentary realism, but through a kind of fragile projection. Not what is, but what could still be imagined. It’s a risky move, bordering on naïve, and precisely for that reason it works.

Then the record turns.

Side B doesn’t escalate theatrically. It darkens. The tonal palette thickens, the rhythms feel heavier, less fluid. The voices shift from children to adults, and with them comes rhetoric, urgency, anger that no longer needs translation. The presence of Philipp Selalmazidis adds a metallic tension, lines that don’t so much accompany as press against the existing material, amplifying its unease.

What’s striking is how the album refuses resolution. There is no synthesis between innocence and anger, no comforting narrative arc. Instead, the two states coexist, uneasily, like parallel realities forced into the same acoustic space. The listener is left to navigate that tension without guidance, which is either a profound gesture of respect or a quiet abdication of responsibility. Possibly both.

There’s also an ethical precision in Barakat’s decision not to use direct recordings from current atrocities. In a cultural landscape increasingly comfortable with turning suffering into raw material, this restraint feels deliberate. The record doesn’t document. It resonates. It creates a space where listening becomes less about consuming information and more about acknowledging presence - past, present, unresolved.

Released by Discrepant, a label known for its interest in displaced sounds and fractured histories, "Chronicles from the Arab Cold War" fits into a catalog that often questions how music travels through time and context. Not everything lands cleanly. At times, the layering feels almost too careful, as if aware of its own weight. But perhaps that hesitation is part of the work. This is not music that wants to convince you. It wants you to remain aware of what cannot be resolved, what cannot be neatly framed.

Between innocence and anger, the record doesn’t choose. It holds both, and lets them interfere with each other.

It’s not comfortable listening. It shouldn’t be.