User:Mashrouleila

Carl Gerges is one fourth of Mashrou Leila, a Beirut-based indie band whose rousing, sensual electro-pop anthems have earned them hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. Ostensibly Gerges is the band’s drummer, the core of the rhythm section, but his role in the creative process goes far deeper. He is also a composer and a central part of the art direction of the band’s striking visuals and stage design which have accompanied them to 80 cities in the past 10 years.

Mashrou Leila’s songs about political freedoms, LGBT rights, race, religion and modern Arab identity have challenged the status quo of the Middle-Eastern music industry. They have been described as “the voice of their generation” and “the Arab world’s most influential independent band”. With them Gerges has toured the United States, Europe and the Middle East. He’s collaborated with Hercules and Love Affair, Roisin Murphy, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard, and Nile Rodgers and been Artist-in-Residence at NYU and onboard Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior. He’s been on the cover of L’Officiel and Rolling Stone. But Carl’s journey into adulthood could have gone very differently and it started with architecture. He was dedicated enough to the discipline that he received his architecture diploma from the American University of Beirut in 2011. If life hadn’t led him to fill stadiums, it would certainly have led him to design them. Even now, he still practices architecture on a handful of projects he’s particularly passionate about.

The impulse for Gerges has always been one of creation, regardless of the medium. Whether through design, architecture or music, the primary driver has always been the act of creation. For Gerges, the fields are overlapping anyway, he concluded as much in his senior thesis on the intersection of music and architecture. When he’s on tour he always dedicates a few hours to architectural exploration in a city he’s discovering or rediscovering.