This paper will look at collaborative and experimental music production in Lebanon as a site for curatorial activism (Reilly 2018) and homemaking practices in urban Beirut. Drawing on fieldwork undertaken in Beirut after the 2020 Port explosion and during the ongoing economic crisis, I argue that social and economic developments not only affect the labour conditions of music producers, musicians and consumers of non-state funded music in Lebanon but forges an affective network of practitioners and listeners with shared intimacies, vulnerabilities, lack of control and friendship as central themes in contemporary artistic practices. Sharing research findings from participant-observation during the festival season in Beirut, I present findings in the affective dimensions of artist-led institutions and cultural NGOs since the Port explosion that challenges neocolonial cultural policy frameworks and funding programmes in the SWANA region and European embassies stationed in Lebanon. Drawing on scholarly findings in the field of anthropology, ethnomusicology, media studies, and Middle Eastern studies (Thomas 2007, Swedenburg 2013, El-Ghadhban and Strohm 2013, Ventura 2017, Sprengel 2020), I look at the way narratives on liberation politics and modernity in Lebanon have shaped and continue to shape the productive capacities, emotional labour, and care work, of musicians, institutions and NGO funding for arts and culture in the SWANA region. In the context of alternatives themes outside resistance and politicised themes, the notion of “home” frequently came up in interviews with interlocutors in Beirut as a way of describing the affective networks that connect musicians with their city as a place that emotionally affects musicians in their practice and choice to stay and build platforms that work outside official cultural institutions. In analysing the song “Home is so sad” by Lebanese dream pop band Postcards and adjacent networks of producers and musicians, this paper draws on ambivalent feelings about “home” outside the public eye that act as a crucial counter narrative around musical practices and reflects on Beirut as both a psycho-social and physical space and ways to feel home in the uncanny (Freud 1919, Clack 2008).