Jerusalem in My Heart

Jerusalem in My Heart is an audio-visual performance project from Montreal-based record producer, recording engineer, and musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Montreal-based filmmaker Erin Weisgerber. They have been recording for Montreal's independent Constellation Records label since 2013. Live, they create an immersive sonic and visual live experience in forging modern experimental Arabic music wed to organically created visuals using 16mm analog film at site-specific screen installations. Their recordings, beginning with 2013's Mo7it Al-Mo7it, showcase Moumneh melding "traditional" melismatic singing (almost always in Arabic) and bouzouki with modular synthesis, filter banks, electronics, field recordings, and more. In live settings, Weisgerber simultaneously manipulates the photographic, chemical, and material properties of 16mm film, thus transforming the world as framed through her camera. Her images are rhythmic, existing between representation and abstraction, external vision and internal landscape. After a self-titled collaboration with Suuns in 2014, JIMH issued If He Dies, If If If If If If a year later, adding more layers from the Lebanese folk tradition to their mix. 2018's Daqa'iq Tudaiq proved their most musical outing to date. Its first half was comprised of the traditional four-part suite "Wa Ta'atalat Loughat Al Kalam." 2021's Qalaq was a thoroughly collaborative affair that featured Greg Fox, Lucrecia Dalt, Moor Mother, and Tim Hecker, among others. Jerusalem in My Heart was founded in 2005 by Montreal resident and Lebanese national Radwan Ghazi Moumneh. Born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1975, his family left the city when he was a a child as the country's civil war closed in. They initially relocated to Oman, Jordan; it was the first country that would grant them visas. Moumneh was enrolled in a Hindi-speaking school for time that was founded to educate the children of Indian servants. In 1993, Moumneh's family were granted immigration visas to Canada; they emigrated to Montreal soon after the beginning of the first Gulf War. His parents couldn't assimilate and returned to Lebanon five years later while Moumneh remained and attended university. In 2005 he considered JIMH primarily as an art project consisting of contemporary Arabic and electronic music in collaboration with 16mm film projections and strategically oriented lighting installations, to explore the relationships between music, visuals, and audience. In 2012, Moumneh, a skilled recording engineer and producer, began to expand JIMH from its one-off, site-specific, live multi-media performance origins into a recording project as an extension of the live audio-visual duo experience where performances could be "repeated." They became well known on Montreal's art scene for their performances -- some featured as many as 35 performers/participants. In 2011, he began working intensely in a trio with French musician Jérémie Regnier and Chilean filmmaker and visual artist Malena Szlam Salazar. This group collaboration resulted in JIMH signing to Montreal's Constellation Records and releasing their debut album, Mo7it Al-Mo7it (Ocean of the Ocean), in March of 2013. They played shows across Ontario, in select U.S. and European cities as well as Beirut. Upon return, Moumneh collaborated with art-punk band Suuns on a well-received self-titled long-player cut at Hotel2Tango studio where Moumneh is co-owner and works as a sound engineer and producer. The collaborative spirit proved liberating. For 2015's If He Dies, If If If If If If, he enlisted guitarists Sharif Sehnaoui and Ian Ilavsky as well as percussionist Pierre-Guy Blanchard to assist on select tracks. It was followed by tours of North America and Europe with a stop in Lebanon. For 2018's Daqa'iq Tudaiq, Moumneh shifted gears profoundly. The first half of the album was devoted to a 20-minute orchestral version of Mohammed Abdel Wahab & Ahmad Shawqi classic "Ya Jarata Al Wadi," retitled "Wa Ta'atalat Loughat Al Kalam," in collaboration with guitarist Sam Shalabi and a 15-piece Lebanese orchestra. While the first two movements stayed close to the original score, the instrumental third movement offered an adventurous re-conception of Arabic motifs, while the fourth combined the two approaches. The latter half contained four original works delivered in a decidedly more experimental style. With the world in lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic all touring stopped. Moumneh began conceiving and composing JIMH's fifth album, Qalaq, as a companion to Daqa’iq Tudaiq, its mirror image. He composed with a "dismantled orchestra." He invited a large group of individual musicians, including Lucrecia Dalt, Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Greg Fox, Alexei Perry Cox, and many others, to collaborate via internet file-exchange. They worked from his through-composed source materials on an otherwise open canvas. Each of the set's 13 tracks provided contributing artists opportunities to decompose, edit, re-interpret, and recompose as they desired. After receiving their tracks, Moumneh mixed them into his own, remolding and re-creating his compositions with their influences. Qalaq was released in October 2021 while JIMH was on tour.
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