Monday Roundup #37

In the absence of concert listings, my regular Monday dispatches have fallen off. After bringing some life to the blog with the "bumping into" series, I figure I should get back in the groove. I'm guessing that this will be a bit like what used to get shoved into the end of the post when I was doing listings — some bandcamp suggestions, nods to a few livestreams, and sundry community notes (email me if you have anything that needs broadcast in the latter category!). Plus maybe a look back through the MFS archives.

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Community notes:

• In case you missed it, here's a peek inside the rebuilt Silver Dollar Room at College and Spadina, which may cause feelings of dislocation and/or ambiguity in anyone who spent some time there soaking in the rock'n'roll.

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Livestream nation:

• This month's Exit Points (Thursday, September 30) is a special collaboration with the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts; Sensorium Centre for Digital Arts and Technology; and the School for Arts, Media, Performance, and Design and will feature two improvising electroacoustic ensembles: Brigitte Bardon't/Kavi/thispatcher plus Esin Gunduz/Megan Kyle/Ninja Riot.

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Concert listings:

• Holy Oak Family Singers + Surprise Guest / Island Cafe 2021-09-30 (Thursday). $pwyc. [FB event]

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Bandcamp corner:

• It's Bandcamp Friday again this week! Stock up on music for your fall walks + support the artists you dig! Here's a couple things I'll be buying/pre-ordering:

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It happened this week...

• ...on September 27, 2014 at June Records (Cassette Store Day).

Pneuma Ensemble - Stella Splendens

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

Jerusalem in My Heart - 7ebr El 3oyoun

[Do remember that you can click on the tags below to go back and find the original posts (and often, more stuff) from these artists.]

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: 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.

Recording: Suuns + Jerusalem In My Heart

Artist: Suuns + Jerusalem In My Heart

Songs: Koll Lil-Mali7ati Fi Al-Khimar Al-Aswadi + Metal

Recorded at Geary Lane ("Sound Séance I": Night 2), June 13, 2015.

Suuns + Jerusalem In My Heart - Koll Lil-Mali7ati Fi Al-Khimar Al-Aswadi

Suuns + Jerusalem In My Heart - Metal

The culmination of Geary Lane's year-long journey, the inaugural version of this event overcame some bureaucratic hurdles to present a weekend-long showcase of a non-corporate alternative to the city's increasingly-crowded festival calendar. Tucked away in its little pocket on the other side of the tracks, Geary Lane does feel a little off the grid but works well as an conceptual island getaway for sonic adventurers. Partnered with Suoni Per Il Popolo, the "name" draws skewed a bit toward une certaine esthétique de Montréal but each night did include cool local sounds as well. The festival's middle night was the Big Rock Show, with the room getting packed early on with a rambunctious crowd. The music was correspondingly more in-your-face than the nights around it, and though that substituted the cool clubhouse vibe for something more akin to a warehouse party, the well-organized night still went off without a hitch.

It'd been a few years since I'd checked in on Montréal's Suuns, so I was a little surprised to see that they've managed to garner quite a room-packing following. But although they were quite clearly the draw (and it's their label that's released the collaboration at hand), in performance it definitely felt that this project was being driven by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, the cosmopolitan Beirut/Montréal sonic explorer behind the Jerusalem in My Heart project. As the set's one-two punch presented here attests, it's the rhythms and textures of the Arabic pop that he explores and deconstructs that drive this, with Suuns then adding some rock'n'roll crunch that aren't foregrounded in Moumneh's solo live performances. When those two things combined, such as in the driving "Metal", this was unbeatable stuff. A couple runs later on at what I assume were Suuns' own tracks didn't quite attain the same lift-off, but on the whole, this hour-long set felt full of an exciting energy.

Recording: Jerusalem In My Heart

Artist: Jerusalem In My Heart

Song: 3anzah Jarbanah

Recorded at The Great Hall ("Constellation: A Night in Toronto"), September 5, 2013.

Jerusalem In My Heart - 3anzah Jarbanah

Full review to follow. Montréal's Constellation came down the 401 for a well-executed night at The Great Hall. The event might have lacked star power (original headliner Colin Stetson had to drop out owing to an injury), but the performances were uniformly strong, giving an attentive crowd a chance to get caught up with some of the less-heralded artists on the label's roster. Radwan Ghazi Moumneh led the night off with a set of deconstructed Arabic songs, reconstituted with electronic drones. It quickly established a devotional tone in the room, the audience so quiet that they didn't even clap between some of the tracks. The music's effect was accentuated by Malena Szlam Salazar's abstract 16mm film loops. Completely engrossing stuff.