IT’S a Friday night in Cairo and the whole city is rushing to get home before the 7pm curfew. Tanks are rumbling into position, ready to block the roads. Taxis are charging double to whiz people home on time. Shops and restaurants closed up two hours ago, and soon the streets of Africa’s largest city — normally bustling till the small hours — will be eerily quiet.

But at Vibe music studios in Dokki, west Cairo, the night is only just beginning. Ahmad el-Sawy, an oud player, and Kareem Hossam, a bassist, have just arrived to record parts of the latter’s new fusion jazz album. They can’t leave until 6am, when the curfew ends, so they’ll just play through the night. “Music needs to come out of me,” says el-Sawy, “so I come here. There are many musicians around.

We record, we jam, we try to use the curfew as a creative time.”

Cairo’s curfew has been in place since Aug 14, after the massacre of up to 1,000 supporters of ousted president Mohamed Morsi unleashed a wave of violence across the country. From Saturday to Thursday, though, the curfew’s hours have been eased, and normality is returning. But on Fridays - the traditional day of protest in Egypt - it still stretches from 7pm to 6am.

At first, this rendered the city’s distinctive nightlife “completely dead”, says Hossam. Cafes shut. Gigs were cancelled. Studios such as Vibe closed early. But here and there, Cairenes and the artists and musicians among them found ways of circumventing the restrictions. “When the curfew started,” says Vibe’s owner, Ahmed Mohamed, “we realised we had a problem. Nobody was going to come. We weren’t going to be able to pay our overheads.” So Mohamed extended his opening hours, offering musicians the chance to use his studios for the entire night — at half price. And if they get tired, they can sleep on the sofa.

Cabin fever is unavoidable. “I’d like to feel I’m choosing to stay,” says el-Sawy, “rather than being forced to.” But there are unexpected bonuses. “It’s been fun, actually,” says Hossam. “Live music was pretty much zero last month, so we came here instead. It gave me a chance to focus on the album. Now I’m almost done.”

When the curfew started, concerts were impossible: how would the audience get home? The organisers at one venue had an answer: just let them stay till dawn. So musicians played all night at the Makan cultural centre in central Cairo, their sets punctuated by film screenings.

“Whatever’s happening,” says Hossam, who played at Makan, “Egyptians will find their own way of making something good out of it.”

For artist Bahaa Talis, that way was with video. Ten days into the curfew, Talis filmed himself on a night-time stroll. Technically, this isn’t allowed, and most people don’t try their luck — but often the army turns a blind eye. Shooting himself on an iPad, Talis left his flat, wandered through the silent streets, passed an army checkpoint, before finally arriving at a cafe unexpectedly heaving with people. The next night, he walked the same route — but this time narrating it over the phone to a collaborator, Timo Herbst, who was in Wolfsburg, Germany. Herbst then interpreted Talis’s words with a physical performance in front of a German audience.

For Talis, the project was a way of showing how odd the situation was — and how life went on regardless. “People had a weird idea about what was happening here,” he says.

“People were calling me as if I was in a war zone.” His aim was to show what was really happening.

It was important for Talis to end the film by arriving suddenly — and surprisingly — at a cafe filled with customers. While western TV screens had been filled with scenes of death, he wanted to show that much of Cairo was calm, that people were getting on with their lives as best they could. Nevertheless, much of his film — which we watch together on the street it ends on, with a new curfew fast approaching — has a haunting tension. “The city never [before] stopped making sounds — it’s an exceptional moment,” marvels Talis at one point in the video, as he walks down a deserted road that would normally be crammed with cars. “Enjoy the middle of the street. It’s not the time for sidewalks.”

There are fraught moments, in particular when Talis approaches a checkpoint. In tenser areas of Egypt, people have been shot for doing the same. “I don’t know what the hell will happen if they stop me and find out I’m shooting a film,” he says. But though Talis says the experience made him “uncomfortable”, like many Egyptians, he blames Morsi’s supporters for making the curfew necessary, rather than the widely loved army for enforcing it.

Morsi’s backers continue to protest against the army’s brutal treatment of Islamists, often well into the curfew.

An even smaller minority of Egyptians bang pots and pans from their kitchen windows during curfew hours — marking their opposition to the authoritarianism of both the army and the Muslim Brotherhood. But the majority of Egyptians see the situation as a choice between either the army or the Brotherhood, and have sided with the former.

It is this unity with the military that Talis also hopes his film touches on. By showing how he could walk unhindered through checkpoints, Talis argues that the army is on his side. “I know they are from this country,” he says, “so I know that if I come into contact with them, I will be OK.”

He looks at the clock: 7pm is fast approaching. The army and the people may be one — as a popular chant goes — but Talis must still get home on time.

By arrangement with the Guardian