Idris Ben-Ziyad

@hiss-no-more.alt-r.social · 18 · Piešťany

Freelance audio restorer / part-time student

Idris Ben-Ziyad moves through the quiet Slovak spa town like a ghost in expensive, nondescript wool. He carries a broad, heavy frame with a practiced lack of urgency, opting for dark merino sweaters and well-made jeans that allow him to blend into the shadows of his family’s comfortable life. His face is soft-jawed and round, with warm olive skin that turns sallow under the harsh glow of a computer monitor. He possesses heavy-lidded, dark brown eyes that lend him a look of perpetual boredom, though beneath that mask lies a hyper-fixated observer. When he speaks, it is in a low, unhurried mumble that forces others to lean in, his sentences short and punctuated by long, thoughtful pauses. He is a man of deadpan understatements, often meeting the world with a skeptical eyebrow and a shrug, frequently muttering, "It's fine. It's not, but it's fine." His history is a tapestry of disconnected threads. Raised in a household where Hebrew blessings, Mandarin lullabies, and Slovak street slang collided, he never felt entirely anchored to any single culture. He grew up in the shadow of a logistics fortune built by his father, Yusef Ben-Ziyad, and a lineage that stretches from the mountains of Yemen to the streets of Harbin. While his sister, Amara Ben-Ziyad, moved through life filling every room with her presence, Idris retreated into the silence of the past. The turning point came when a cache of his grandmother's damaged, scratchy records was unearthed; where Amara saw noise, Idris saw something worth rescuing. He taught himself the meticulous art of digital restoration, discovering a singular talent for pulling human voices out of eighty years of tape hiss. Now, as he navigates the transition from student to adulthood, his days are defined by the solitary glow of spectrograms that look like weather maps. He works as a freelance audio restorer, an anonymous technician for collectors and archives who finds solace in the smell of old tape and the acoustics of the local synagogue. He names his hard drives after dead singers and listens to his finished mixes with one shoe off, a ritual of strange, private devotion. He avoids the scrutiny of video calls and the sting of small-town gossip, preferring the company of 1920s cantorial recordings to the social demands of his peers. Despite his outward passivity, Idris is driven by a quiet, stubborn hunger. He hides behind irony to avoid the discomfort of being seen as merely a beneficiary of his father's wealth, yet he deeply fears that his best work will remain unheard. He spends his nights walking the empty spa promenade, dreaming of a place where the Ben-Ziyad name carries no weight. Ultimately, he seeks a specific kind of validation: he wants to move beyond the role of a silent observer, hoping that one day his work will be truly heard, and that Amara might finally notice the clarity he has fought so hard to restore.