Qalaq

Description

Jerusalem In My Heart, one of the most uncompromising and dynamic projects in 21st-century Arab-Levantine avant-garde art and music, presents a new album of viscerally expressive electronic and electroacoustic music, infused with spoken and sung Arabic, bouzouki playing, and the electronic sounds and sound design of Lebanese-Canadian musician and producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. Qalaq is the most varied and finely crafted Jerusalem In My Heart album to date, with a different collaborator on almost every track including Lucrecia Dalt, Tim Hecker, Moor Mother, Greg Fox, Rabih Beaini, Alanis Obomsawin, and more. "Qalaq" is an Arabic word with many semantic nuances, but Moumneh refers to it particularly as a deep concern - on various obvious global levels, but also specifically with regard to Lebanon: the collapse of its domestic politics, economy, and infrastructure, the tragedy and aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion; a complex geography and geopolitics that continue to condemn the country to corruption, disruption, destabilization, and violence. The tracks on the second side are all named Qalaq, then numbered, representing the degrees of layered violence that Lebanon and the Levant have reached over the past two years. Qalaq is a mirror image of Daqa'iq Tudaiq, the previous album released in 2018, where one side of the album features a 20-minute piece in four movements recorded live in Beirut with a 15-piece acoustic orchestra. By contrast, Qalaq was composed with an orchestra dismantled across the dissociated/isolated spacetime of lockdown. Moumneh composed the album as a bare skeleton, giving each artist a section to break down, edit, reinterpret, and recombine as they saw fit, then mixed these parts with his own to reshape the whole with newly found coherences. Qalaq is marked by a variety of artistic processes and a diversity of approaches, while retaining a fundamental sonic aesthetic and a deep synthesis of emotional and narrative power. The album artwork and especially the color cover photograph by Myriam Boulous, which captures a scene during Beirut's October Revolution in 2019, further contextualize the specificity and laments of Qalaq; the deep concern at its heart.