Bilal Nasser is a Palestinian-Canadian guitarist, composer, activist, and harm reduction worker from Windsor, Ontario. Raised in a family with many Palestinian refugees among its members, he has been a participant in the Palestinian solidarity movement since childhood. His political and musical upbringings developed in tandem through his discovery of punk rock around the time of the 2008 Gaza wars and subsequent Arab Spring uprisings. To Nasser, there is no separation between art and politics, while at the same time he maintains that art alone is not resistance.
Nasser was trained as a classical guitarist from a young age and won several awards in composition and performance. While his technique is informed by this background, Nasser’s music juxtaposes usical influences rooted in a DIY ethos drawn from post-rock, shoegaze, hardcore, and drone—a deliberate immersion in subcultures and aesthetics outside the boundaries of the classical music world. He actively rejects the sterility and rigidity of institutional convention, bridging oft-considered antithetical in pursuit of innovation, communality, and a distinct musical voice shaped by liminal exploration of canonical and underground realms.
Using electronics and effects pedals, home-made drone machines, tape loops, and singing and screaming into his amplified guitar, his practice aims to destabilise and vitalise traditions of solo guitar performance. His live shows generally take place in skateparks, dive bars, book stores, and warehouses; equally a class-conscious and aesthetic choice to situate his music in community and prioritise access over formality. He is the first known classical guitarist to have a mosh pit at a concert.
In 2021 Nasser released his first full-length solo album Where the Orange Groves Grow for classical guitar, voice, and electronics, with compositions ranging from sprawling long-form solo guitar pieces depicting tales of memory and loss from the Palestinian diaspora, to violent frenzies of looped noise. His sophomore record, How Can We Say Nothing, was written and recorded before the ongoing genocide of Gaza and south Lebanon by the Zionsist entity in 2023, and in fact emphasized a more personal than political statement, accompanied by cover art depicting his grandparents in Mecca. Upon its release in early 2024, the album and its title took on new meaning as an urgent outcry for mobilization. Nasser toured extensively across Canada in support of How Can We Say Nothing, sharing stages with OBMIGIIZI, Atsuko Chiba, Horse Jumper of Love, Efrim Menuck, and One Leg One Eye, and at festivals including Intersection and River and Sky. His work has been featured by Musicworks, Dominionated, and CBC.
Every Martyr Is A Universe is Nasser’s third album and first for Montréal experimental music label Constellation. His most politically-motivated record to date, it was conceived during his participation in the student intifada and encampment movement of 2024. The album is Nasser's first major compositional work to move intentionally beyond solo guitar, enlisting an ensemble of strings, horns, electronics, percussion, piano and voice. This genre-fluid, multi-movement opus explores the moral, spiritual, and social crisis of “normalcy” in a time of genocide to which the governments of our “advanced democracies” lend direct support and consent. Samples from Palestinian historical films and Zionist military shortwave radio broadcasts are woven into various instrumental passages and the album’s title is taken from a slogan of the movement, carried by thousands on placards and banners:
Every Martyr Is A Universe.
Nasser’s practice interrogates the inherent contradictions of the diasporic experience and grapples with the inescapable hypocrisy of making political art from the imperial core. While those on the front lines of what Mohammed Abdou describes as the “end-times wars” engage in direct resistance, the futility of “resistance art” in a time of genocide is a tension that courses through Nasser’s consciousness and activates his terms of engagement, while holding fast to the utility of art as a communal, spiritual, and organizational tool towards ends of liberation, drawing inspiration from such figures as Ghassan Kanafani, Marcel Khalife, and Mohammed El Kurd.
