Jerusalem In My Heart (JIMH) returns with Daqa'iq Tudaiq, the third full-length album from the Montréal-Beirut contemporary Arabic audio-visual duo, following the acclaimed 2015 release If He Dies, If If If If If If (year-end lists at The Wire (#39), The Quietus (#24) and A Closer Listen (Top 10), among other accolades). Featuring voice, electronics, buzuk and other instrumentation from composer-producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Matana Roberts, Suuns, BIG|BRAVE) and complemented by the 16mm analog film work of Charles-André Coderre in live performance, JIMH continues to expand the horizons of its profound conceptual and aesthetic engagement with Arabic/Middle-Eastern traditions. Daqa'iq Tudaiq translates as “minutes that bother/oppress/harass” – which presumably needs no further explanation – and features two distinct album sides of music.

Side One realizes a long-held dream of Moumneh’s to record a modern orchestral version of the popular Egyptian classic “Ya Garat Al Wadi” by the legendary composer Mohammad Abdel Wahab. JIMH assembled a 15-piece orchestra in Beirut, enlisting the celebrated Montréal-Cairo musician/composer Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush) as arranger and musical director for the session. Anchored by the stately hypnotic pace of plucked and percussive instruments (riq, santur, derbakeh, kanun), the piece unfolds with lush, languid, reverb-drenched manoeuvrings through virtuosic Maqam shifts (oriental scales). Moumneh’s melismatic lead vocals and electronic production sensibility pay homage to the genre’s documented historical recording traditions, while pushing things subtly and respectfully into new territories of sonic distortion and noised, artefact-laden transmission. The song’s original title (with lyrics penned in 1928 by the poet Ahmad Shawqi) translates as “Oh Neighbour Of The Valley”, but JIMH takes a different line from the original lyric as the new title for its orchestral-electronic re-interpretation. “Wa Ta'atalat Loughat Al Kalam” (“The Language Of Speech Has Broke Down”) is an expression of wordless love and transcendent communication between two lovers’ eyes in Shawqi’s poem; JIMH re-titles the song with this line, exploding the sentiment with more complexity, tragedy and socio-political meaning – also prefiguring the formal aesthetic ruptures JIMH bring to the piece itself. Love in a time of politics, politics in a world conspiring against love, and the specificity of Arab diasporic experience in our brutish 21st century.

Side Two comprises four tracks of non-ensemble “solo” material by Moumneh which push rupture and decomposition/recomposition of tradition further into avant-garde territory – voice, buzuk and electronics take the lead on a suite of emotive and evocative songs, including the percussive loop-driven instrumental “Bein Ithnein” (“Between Two” ) and the stunningly unsettling processed vocal track “Thahab, Mish Roujou', Thahab” (“The Act Of Departing, Not Returning, Departing”).

Daqa'iq Tudaiq features album art by Charles-André Coderre, whose innovative 16mm film techniques frame JIMH’s entire visual identity – this time using archival photos from the Arab Image Foundation, which have been re-photographed and subjected to experimental chemical treatments of Coderre’s own invention.

Daqa'iq Tudaiq is a masterful, mesmerizing artistic statement and confirms Jerusalem In My Heart as one of the most engaged and forward-looking groups at work in avant-garde Middle Eastern music today. Thanks for listening.

Sandro Perri returns with In Another Life, his first new solo album since the acclaimed Impossible Spaces from 2011 (which garnered a Best New Track and Top 50 Albums of 2011 from Pitchfork, among many other accolades). Perri has been called “one of the most singular producers in contemporary music” (Boomkat) and his long affiliation with Constellation through various electronic and singer-songwriter guises (Polmo Polpo, Glissandro 70, Off World) has produced a uniquely adventurous and iconoclastic discography. In Another Life expands on this in peerless fashion.
The new album is what Perri describes as “an experiment in ‘infinite’ songwriting.” The title track is a 24-minute pop mantra for sequenced synth, piano, guitar and voice, progressing sideways rather than forward. A relaxed three-chord vamp runs the length of the album’s Side One, peppered with Sandro’s languid, lilting vocal and adorned with continually developing musical details – massaging the listener with the joys of repetition while defying stasis and monotony. Like the longer-form work of fellow-travellers Bill Callahan, Destroyer or Arthur Russell, Perri extends the notion of the meditative minimalist pop song to its literal maximum, flouting ‘commercial’ concerns in our streamingly short-attention-span era – and perhaps implicitly calling for a politics of slow consumption? The lyric of “In Another Life” suggests as much, moving through bemused critiques and degrees of equivocation about unrealized utopias, culminating with the final stanza: “Beyond the choice of create or destroy / inherit, steal, gift or employ / Fair is far too small a word we’d enjoy / In another life / So hold a promise no bigger than two hands / Hope scaled and re-read in human / And not reduced to a list of demands / In another life.”
Side Two of In Another Life features a similar approach, though in a distinct 3-part series: “Everybody’s Paris” begins with Perri on vocals, with the mic then handed over to André Ethier (The Deadly Snakes) and Dan Bejar (Destroyer) respectively, who each take a vocal turn singing lyrics of their own. Sandro calls this “a song-cycle designed to accept any lyrical variation fed into it: a fill-in-the-blanks questionnaire in the form of a song.” Of course “Everybody’s Paris” ends up being much more than this, with the evocative phrase of the song’s title serving as the lyrical tent pole and recurring refrain; an anchor point for signification and sentiment that intentionally belies the suggestion of anything prosaic or administrative about Perri’s formal conceit. In the hands of these three master lyricists and voices – and with Perri subtly reconfiguring the instrumentation and arrangements for each of the three parts – “Everybody’s Paris” emerges as a profound and fitting sibling (a set of triplet brothers?) to Side One’s ‘infinite’ title track.
The result is a gently yet enormously affecting album that basks thoughtfully and discerningly in a slow, sweet melancholia. In Another Life is a supremely listenable return to form for Sandro Perri, the music like a temporal analogue to a tender nature tableau registering slight changes under shifting light and a meditative gaze: at once appearing to signify only itself, while auguring the promise of harmonious life.

Reclusive glitch artist and electronic music producer William Jourdain has been keeping busy since the release of his acclaimed 2016 debut Momentform Accumulations for Constellation under the moniker Automatisme. From his home studio in the Quebec town of Saint-Hyacinthe, alongside his day job at Fréquences (one of the country's leading indie record stores), Jourdain has continued churning out quality tracks, adding to his excellent and formidable Bandcamp discography. The Post-Landscape collaboration with Erinome came out on Neologist in spring 2018 (alongside their re-release of the pre-Momentform album Automatisme 2) and the self-released E.T.I. Space, Transit Et Individu (Reshape & Restoration) from December 2017 demonstrated various evolutions in the post-Momentform trajectory. Rare Automatisme performances have included Inductive Prism VI (documented in a live recording) and MUTEK 2017 (documented in a live video premiered by MUTEK and Resident Advisor).
Building out his modular synthesis racks and amassing new field recordings, Jourdain has plunged Automatisme deeper into experimentation with Transit, his second full-length for Constellation. Once again the sonic material is all sourced from the field, with recordings captured in the forests and caves of rural Quebec, along with ex-urban "non-places", and various waiting rooms. A simulacrum of what Jourdain calls "the architecture and landscape of supermodernity" is rendered through generative and probability-based digital patches, creating a partially randomized ecosystem for his soundworld to unfold.
The through-line on the Transit album is an oscillating tempo that rises and falls like a shifting heart rate or ocean waves or a warped clock - heightening attention to the micro-sampled glitch topography and white, pink and brown noise fields of these immersive, pointillist compositions. The pieces are never the same twice: Transit codifies one iteration of these exploratory and temporally unstable works, yielding a superb album of cerebral, enveloping, de-territorialized electronica that occupies a liminal space at the boundaries of ambient, glitch, dub and environmental sound.