Jerusalem In My Heart interview – “I see my music as a porcupine – it’s nice, but don’t touch it.”
We meet the extraordinary Jerusalem In My Heart
“We know the power of that music when we realise how much music around the globe is banned for political reasons. This medium is effective.” Jerusalem In My Heart’s Radwan Moumneh fizzes with energy as he sits in his Montreal studio, wearing a pitch-black T-shirt, dark sunglasses and a discreetly radiant smile. He’s poised to embark upon an imminent UK tour which will see him not only perform, but also serve as a guest curator at Birmingham’s long-running Supersonic Festival. It’s around 8.30 am, Montreal time, but the musician and producer is wide-awake and raring to go. “I have two small children, so our day starts super amped. I’m up at six, so eight-thirty is like lunchtime to me.”
Moumneh’s Jerusalem in My Heart project features a captivating blend of traditionally influenced Arabic reveries, dextrous buzuq-playing and melismatic singing with a futurist core of modular synthesis and “hyper-dissected electronics.” Active since 2013, the act has seen him produce a potent body of politically-charged albums, the bulk of which have arrived on Canadian label, Constellation. His upcoming tour takes in dates in Bristol, London, Newcastle and Glasgow, with the cornerstone Supersonic Festival show on July 10. “There’s lots of stuff happening,” he says. “We’ve been doing a long run of shows, so let’s just say we feel like the machine is quite lubed.”
Having previously performed at Supersonic’s 15th-anniversary event in 2019, he was thrilled to be invited back as both a performer and guest curator, approaching the task with the vigour and enthusiasm one might expect from such an incandescent creator. Working with a tight budget, he set to work assembling a line-up of artists who are each endowed with a unique voice and a suitably gripping edge to their music. “It’s all people whose work I have a love for,” he says. “The budget of the festival, like most indie stuff, is quite limited. So, you’re trying to make miracles happen with very little means. It had to be feasible, fit the budget, and, more than anything, super interesting. I think everyone performing is a real big-hitter.”
True to his intention, Radwan’s Supersonic cast is comprised of an intriguing mix of musical and visual artists. Belgian free improv artist Farida Amadou will join Jerusalem in My Heart for the entire UK tour, thanks in no small part to some agile logistical assistance from the team behind the festival. The inclusion of Palestinian producer and rapper Bint7alal, meanwhile, was the result of time spent immersed in at-home listening, with her Soundcloud mixtapes proving enough of a hit with Radwan and his friends to secure her place on the stage. “Other than her music I really know nothing about her, which is kind of amazing. I’m super excited about discovering the person and the live show.”
Elsewhere we find another artist whose work Radwan has admired from afar, with Beirut-based artist Jessika Khazrik set to present her collage of scavenged sounds alongside 3D visual artist, Nurah Farahat. While Radwan has yet to witness the majority of his chosen performers functioning in the flesh, completing his curated lineup we find an artist with whom he is far better acquainted. Jerusalem In My Heart’s live shows expand the already powerful narrative and sensory scope by incorporating Erin Weisgerber’s stunning film performance, where a blend of 16mm loops are manipulated and interwoven in real-time to add a mesmerising visual component to the music. “With Jerusalem In My Heart, it’s difficult for people to understand that the person behind the visuals is a different entity within the project, and that person has their own voice and artistic practice,” says Radwan. “I wanted to highlight my deep love for her work and present it to an audience.”
Erin is the fourth artist with whom Radwan has paired to provide visuals for his shows. He feels the stresses, strains and logistical challenges of life on the road prove a high price to pay for his creative partners. “I’ve been a touring musician for most of my life and I’m used to that schedule. Naturally, for a filmmaker, that is a difficult thing to embrace, and they can only do it for so long.” Acutely aware of the sometimes gruelling nature of touring life, each time a previous collaborator has left to pursue their respective careers, Radwan has understood and lovingly accepted their decision. “It’s always been magnificent to see them move on and continue with their work.”
Radwan was introduced to Erin by the project’s previous visual collaborator, Charles-André Coderre, who suggested her as a replacement when the time came for him to step back from the outfit. Having never previously performed live, Erin joined them both on tour to adjust to the craft. It wasn’t long before she elegantly re-imagined the performance from her own creative perspective. “We did a US tour with Moor Mother where they were both doing the visuals. She was taking cues from and studying him, and, being the amazing ninja that she is, really re-arranged it and made it her own. All the visuals are her own, of course.”
Though Radwan has carved out an impressive career making uncompromising music, he considers himself a devoted cinephile. When asked why it’s important for him to include a visual element in his shows, he reveals that he came close to pursuing film over music as a youngster. “Film has always been such a huge part of my life, I consume much more cinema than I do music. From the very beginning of the project, I wanted to create a performance where there’s an occupation of a space and a re-imaging of a sphere for an audience to come at – so it’s not just a musician playing on a stage and some background visuals that accompany the music. I really love the interaction between four projectors and a musician.” For Moumneh, while the tool may be visual, the film itself serves as another musical instrument. “The performance between the two elements is very musical and that makes it very connected. It’s very synchronised for something that is absolutely un-synchronizable.”
Having routinely joined forces with a long line of creative partners across his career, it appears as though collaboration is a concept with which Radwan is particularly fascinated. Last year’s ‘Qalaq’ saw him call upon a far-flung cast of internationally-based artists to manifest the music. Personal yet universal, at times oblique and at times unflinchingly vivid, the 13-track album is monumental in scope and profoundly affecting from start to finish. Though recorded during the pandemic, the related restrictions didn’t prove too much of an added burden when constructing the piece – the plan had always been for each artist to record their respective contributions remotely. “I’m a real fan of collage, of trying to fit a circle in a square. From the get-go, what I proposed to the artists was ‘I’m going to make a skeleton, and I want you to add the meat’ for me to make this animal I’m going to create.”
While projects of this kind often involve a protracted ping-pong of evolving sketches, ideas and overdubs, ‘Qalaq’ was formed in a far more adaptive and improvised fashion. “There was only one exchange that was a little bit ‘back and forth’. [Otherwise] it was like ‘I send you something, you send me back something. What you send me, I will use.’ I had to truly embrace the notion of collaboration.” Operating in this way is not without risk, and inherently requires an enormous level of trust between artists. Happily, this trust proved itself to be well-founded, and Radwan couldn’t have been more emphatic when describing how he felt about the work that came back from his sonic contributors. “All of it blew me away and all of it surprised me. It was a beautiful experience. Sometimes what came back was absolutely not what I expected, each and everyone had an interesting story. When you put forward a proposal like this, naturally, you’re going to get some pretty interesting results. It was really fun. Stressful, because it could all have fallen flat on its face, but none of it did.”
The album title, ‘Qalaq’, comes from the Arabic word for ‘deep worry’. At its core is a politically-charged theme, with its near-blinding light aimed directly at unethical practices carried out by the government in Lebanon – the country of his birth, and where his parents live today. Its unsettling cover art features an undoctored photograph of three masked women standing amidst fiercely burning detritus ignited during a protest against the country’s “insanely and obscenely corrupt” political leaders. The image was captured in Beirut, in October 2019, by Myriam Boulos – a photographer whose brave and powerful work Radwan has long admired. “That picture, to me, sums up the notion of worry and what it is we’re worried about. When you open the record, on the inside, you have all the pictures from the [Beirut] port explosion two years ago. In that, you connect the dots, [you see] the violent crime that the state commits against its own people, that these people have to endure day in, day out.”
A searing political thread courses through Radwan’s work. For him, that very thread is intrinsic to the fabric of all things: to address political themes in his music is nothing short of a burning imperative. “Everything is a political gesture. Me buying a smartphone is a political gesture; me talking to you is a political gesture; me turning on the lights is a political gesture; just like me making art is a political gesture. When people take the politics out of stuff, I find that quite cowardly. It’s OK to say you’re not engaged in these politics, but even you saying that is a political act. Even you saying ‘my art is not political’ is a political statement. All these things are political statements. I think it’s such a western notion to be able to remove yourself from politics, and it’s such a Middle Eastern notion that absolutely everything you do is a political gesture. It’s very important to remember that.”
Despite his commitment to using art to highlight pressing socio-political issues, he maintains that he has no desire to project his voice or opinions through anyone’s mouth, and has no expectation of other artists to follow suit. However, he takes particular umbrage at artists who flatly reject the very idea of their work being politicised. “You can’t force ideas on people, you can’t force conviction. [But] I do have a problem when musicians stubbornly, with venom in their mouths, say that they are not a political entity instead of engaging with the discussion. To say ‘I’m not a politician, my job is to be a musician’. There is no job to be a musician, you’ve chosen to do that. Your job is to be a human being. I would respect you so much if you said ‘I don’t give a fuck about these people’. I’d be like ‘screw that opinion’ but I respect you for having an opinion.”
For Radwan, the butterfly effect of even the smallest political gesture can resonate, feedback and evolve into something far more forceful. Though there is unquestionably a message in his music, it isn’t always glaring, and the listener is, at times, tasked with putting in some work to decipher the latent meaning. “I don’t think my work is blatantly about one thing. It’s all nuanced, and it’s presented in a language that I know the majority of my audiences don’t understand, read, or speak. It’s all about giving people this side of a conversation and this human voice – using the language of music and art to communicate where we cannot communicate with words. It’s all in the nuance, and I’m a big fan of the nuance.”
Mounmeh was born in Lebanon during the country’s Civil War. His home was at the epicentre of the struggle, and with both parents’ families rooted in political factions, the decision was made for his family to take shelter in the Sultanate of Oman in the Persian Gulf. He was raised in the rich and sparsely populated country until the age of 15, after which his family relocated once again – this time moving across oceans and continents to Canada. The culture shock was, understandably, quite massive, and – set against the backdrop of the second Gulf War which had only recently ended – the first few years proved difficult for the entire family. “Moving to a French city like Montreal but being more of an English speaker and an immigrant. It was quite difficult because of how insanely hostile it was.”
His parents were terrified of the prospect of their son being unduly influenced by the temptation of drugs and alcohol, sacrificing and saving enough funds to send him off to a well-heeled private school. The climate he encountered here was a far cry from the “we’re all together” ambience of his school days in Oman, and the competitiveness and bigotry he encountered proved deeply distressing. “To come here and be confronted by this cut-throat, dog-eat-dog mentality from day one, and extreme racism and hostility – from both students and teachers. There was an extreme self-hate because you just feel like an utter, utter alien.” A few years of “difficult internal battles” followed before he began to muster the courage to find his voice, and art and music would provide both a catalyst and an opportunity to channel this burgeoning self-connection.
His earliest relationship with music arrived via the heavy metal and hard rock bands that dominated the Montreal scene at the time, with CDs and cassettes from the likes of Guns N’ Roses and Metallica filling the racks of his local record stores. “We’d buy them all based on the covers,” he recalls, a practice which, thanks to sometimes misleading cover art, didn’t always yield favourable results. “I remember buying a Meatloaf cassette, Bat Out Of Hell, and thinking ‘my god, this is gonna sound evil!’ I put it on and it was like ‘what is this atrocity?'” On other occasions, however, his attachment to sinister aesthetics served him well, and it was the chance purchase of an album from The Misfits that would forever change his musical trajectory. “Strangely there was a CD and cassette shop at Montreal airport, and they had this cassette with a skull on it. I was like ‘this looks insane, I’m gonna buy this’. From there, of course, the floodgates opened on all sorts of crazy punk music.” The caustic punk edge left an indelible mark on Radwan, and he feels these spiky sensibilities can be easily gleaned from his music. “I see my music as a porcupine,” he exclaims. “It’s nice, but don’t touch it. It will burn you! There’s something being said here.”
Patrizio Cavaliere
Buy your copy of Qalaq – click here
Live dates:
07 Jul 2022 – Bristol, UK @The Cube (with Farida Amadou)
08 Jul 2022 – London, UK @Kings Place (with Farida Amadou)
10 Jul 2022 – Birmingham, UK @Supersonic Festival **
11 Jul 2022 – Newcastle, UK @Gosforth Civic Theatre (with Farida Amadou)
12 Jul 2022 – Glasgow, UK @Rum Shack (with Farida Amadou)