Jerusalem In My Heart - Mo7it Al-Mo7it

Jerusalem In My Heart - Mo7it Al-Mo7it (Constellation) Intriguing side on Constellation from Jerusalem In My Heart, a collision of contemporary Arabic and electronic musics which is as refreshing in actuality as it is on paper. A trio comprised of Montreal-based Lebanese musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, French producer Jeremie Regnier and Chilean visual artist Malena Szlam Salazar, this is JIMH's debut album. Moumneh's melismatic Arabic singing, and the overdriven sounds he coaxes out of his acoustic buzuk and zurna, are placed in a humming matrix of saturated synths, distort, tapes echos and delays, and the resulting sound is deliciously paradoxical: ancient yet futuristic, psychedelic yet sure-of-purpose, deeply human yet distinctly alien and out-of-reach. Talismanic opener 'Koll Lil-Mali7ati Fi Al-Khimar Al-Aswadi' sounds like Omar Souleyman cast adrift in one of Emeralds' modular synth-scapes, while 'Yudagdegh El-r3ey Wala-Ghanam comes over like kosmische born of Beirut rather than Berlin, Cologne or Dusseldorf, and the cyclical, sunburned 'Ko7l El-3win, 2emian El-3ein' could almost be a desert mirage as described by Ash Ra. There are a couple of more straightforward, acoustic instrumentals, but JIMH are at their most exhilarating when fusing the trippiest aspects of Middle East and West - see '3anzah Jarbanah', in which devotional cries rebound againt plaintive, widescreen sheets of guitar noise somewhere between Sunn O)) and Slowdive. in boomkat