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 punching like brass knuckles, busted loudspeakers spilling discordant calls to prayer, and street vendors hollering the dead awake. She learned piano to silence the noise, picked up a guitar to compose her existential musings, and took up electronics to turn bad electricity into song. An expressionist, 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.