Recording: Jerusalem in My Heart

Artist: Jerusalem in My Heart

Song: Wa Ta'atalat Loughat Al Kalam

Recorded at The Music Gallery, September 28, 2019.

Jerusalem in My Heart - Wa Ta'atalat Loughat Al Kalam

Leading off a new season at The Music Gallery, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh deconstructed some sounds from Jerusalem in My Heart's third album Daqa'iq Tudaiq, taking the lush pop elements found in this track's album version into the borderlands between granularized micro-looping and harsh digital distortion, literally breaking speech down into discordantly-stuttering phonemes — all the more fascinating when one realizes that the song's title translates as "The Language Of Speech Has Broken Down". Meanwhile Charles-André Coderre's overlapping 8mm films evoked memory's disintegrating fragmentation, reinventing new meanings from the past's left-over collages.

Recording: Cares/Vallée/Coderre

Artist: Cares/Vallée/Coderre

Song: unknown^*

Recorded at The Tranzac's Main Hall (Mixed Input Festival – Night 2), September 17, 2017.

Cares/Vallée/Coderre - unknown

This festival was convened by local experimental film collective Pleasure Dome as an attempt to deepen the collaborative experience between musical and moving image artists, which was manifested in a variety of ways over two nights.

This set was a very even-handed collaboration that got to the heart of the festival's aspirations. Musician James Beardmore was tucked off to the side, generating droneswells with hazy hints of bent pop in the background while Montréal film artists Guillaume Vallée and Charles-André Coderre (known for his work with Jerusalem in My Heart) used overlapping 8mm loops and analogue visual feedback to project a swirling abstract montage. (This was a collaboration in the sonic sense as well — if you listen carefully to this field recording, you can hear the whirwhirwhir of the film spools in the background!)

^* Does anyone know the title to this one? Please leave a comment!

Recording: Jerusalem in My Heart

Artist: Jerusalem in My Heart

Song: 7ebr El 3oyoun

Recorded at Jam Factory (Feast in the East 53), October 2, 2015.

Jerusalem in My Heart - 7ebr El 3oyoun

It was just a few months ago that Radwan Ghazi Moumneh was in town with his collaborative project with Montréal's Suuns, but his return announced a shift to re-focusing on his own material. The awesomely-titled If He Dies, If If If If If If is just out on Constellation Records, and that was the focus here. Mixing sentimental pop songs with drone-dirges, this project filters a whole set of cultural cues through a set of cutting-edge sound filters, reminding us there's far more music under the sun than we encounter on in our immediate surroundings. Live, Moumneh still prefers to perform in near total darkness, illuminated only by Charles-André Coderre's live-action 8mm-film loop collages. He was also joined in this set by violinist Rose Bolton for a couple songs.