Courtesy of Marcia Kempf

Aya Metwalli (b. 1988, Cairo) is a singer born into an orchestra that never tunes. The city taught her music the hard way: car horns striking like brass knuckles, busted loudspeakers spilling discordant calls to prayer, and street vendors hollering the dead awake. She learned the piano to silence the noise, picked up a guitar to wear her heart on the strings, and took up electronics to turn bad electricity into song. Her music is an expressionist lament; her voice quivers as it conquers. Onstage, she doesn’t perform as much as confess: an intimate gesture, a bare nerve amplified, a slow burn with an aftertaste of tristesse.