Magdi Aboul-Kheir Works in Fragments on New Album “The Piano Has Been Dreaming”

About the Artist

Magdi Aboul-Kheir is a German composer, journalist, and cross-genre artist based in Ulm. He moves between classical sensitivity and modern ambient and electronic elements, shaped by a long engagement with music across forms. Alongside composing, he works as chief reporter for Südwest Presse and has spent over two decades writing on film music, which informs his sense of atmosphere and stillness.

His solo piano album The Piano Has Been Dreaming, released April 3, 2026, unfolds as a series of small, intimate pieces. Using both grand and felt piano, the record lingers on affection, loss, memory, and silence, unguarded.

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The Album

Echoes of Tenderness opens the album on deep, soft notes that feel like fingertips pressing into your skin. At first, the gentleness of the melody and the slow way it moves into a higher key, both keys coming together, sound like a passing breeze on your face with a palm caressing your face.

Next, Beauty, Wine and Truth is a tad bit faster. It makes me imagine someone playing this piece in the room next to a crowded ballroom party. Two glasses of wine, one in the hand of someone watching, one set atop the piano. After that, Letters Never Sent dips its feet into melancholy, a deeper key sitting at the base, guiding the track, while the higher key moves in waves of emotion, spilling out words that you don’t hear.

Then, Sanctuary of Dreams leans a bit mysterious in how it colours its atmosphere. Meanwhile, there is an undeniable familiarity in how consistently the notes lap around the track, unchanging. It sounds like lying on your bed and sinking into the mattress as far as you can. Following that, Gravity of the Heart immediately pulls its tone under and deeper. As it moves, it feels like it’s chasing a centre that is pulling at it, like it is inevitably walking toward it.

Next, The Shadow’s Shadow sounds somewhat ominous and haunting. Here, it feels like walking through a huge, largely abandoned mansion at night, hallways lit only by weak, hand-held candlelight, sensing someone brushing in behind you. At times, the melody dips in a way that makes your stomach swoop.

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Then, Last Light and Fading Thoughts spreads its notes far apart, coming in and going out, like consciousness fading in and out, bleary eyes blinking, seeing the sky, feeling the wind, and the warmth of blood one last time. It almost says goodbye, bittersweet. Lastly, Eternal Home begins slowly, but as it unfolds, it builds, one constant base note with others moving above and below it. In the end, it sounds like sitting in that one worn chair at home, rocking back and forth every single day.

By the end, The Piano Has Been Dreaming sounds like sitting still long enough to actually notice what your mind does when nothing interrupts it. Thoughts, some close, some distant, arrive unclear, drift in half-formed, overlap, disappear, come back slightly altered. The music follows that same pattern making precise movements instead of building toward anything bigger. And in its deliberate containment it sits with what’s already there.