Jerusalem In My Heart is a live audio-visual performance of contemporary Arabic and electronic music interwoven with 16mm film projections and light-based (de)constructions of space.
With performances occurring 1-3 times per year, Jerusalem In My Heart exists around the core of musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Montreal filmmaker Charles-André Coderre, who is projecting hand-made visuals on multiple site-specific screen installations.
Moumneh is a Lebanese national who has spent a large part of his adult life in Canada and has been a fixture of the Montréal independent music community from his early days as guitarist in various notable 90s bands to his tireless activity as a sound engineer and producer over the last decade. Moumneh is also active in the Beirut and Lebanese experimental music scenes, where he spends a few months every year.
Moumneh’s vocals and purposefully blown-out sonic sensibility have been the consistent thread, but the music of JIMH has never repeated itself either – one of the reasons Moumneh has resisted any official documentation or definitive recording of the project over the past eight years. At long last, in 2012 Moumneh cleared time and mental space to record a song cycle that cements the foundations of JIMH as an intensely vocal-driven musical project.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tuMhxkUw-AcJIMH
JIMH has always been an immersive sonic and visual live experience; on the musical side, an evolving effort to forge a modern experimental Arabic music that weds melismatic singing in classical Arabic modes to electronic compositions with a punk-rock production sensibility. Mo7it Al-Mo7it captures and conveys all of this, while emphasising the intimacy and narrative pace that focused, intentional studio recording allows. The result is a unique and profoundly emotive album of contemporary Arabic music, a stunningly subtle first record for a musical project that resisted documentation or any sort of fixity for so many years. Moumneh’s voice has become a powerfully authentic instrument and his production techniques – applying distortion, space echo and delay to varying degrees – lend a timeless intensity to the recording. Saturated synths and the overdriven signals of Moumneh’s acoustic playing on buzuk and zurna reinforce the reigning sensibility, providing bracing counterpoint to the vocals and lovely, searching instrumental narratives in their own right.
Jerusalem In My Heart LIVE
Thursday, 20th October 2016 | Doors 19 CET | Start 19:30 CET
Theater im ehemaligen Stummfilmkino Delphi | Gustav-Adolf-Straße 2 | 13086 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg
jerusaleminmyheart.com | ehemaliges-
