Jerusalem In My Heart have shared details of a new album, titled Qalaq.
Set for release in October, the 13-track effort sees Jerusalem In My Heart’s core producer of Radwan Ghazi Moumnen team up with a wide cast of artists that includes Moor Mother, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox, Tim Hecker and Rabih Beaini, among others. You can preview three tracks from the album – which feature Moor Mother, Rabih Beaini and Oiseaux-Tempête – via the embed just below.
The album takes its title from an Arabic word that has a number of meanings, though Moumnen particularly intends it to mean "deep worry" in this instance, drawing on the recent collapse of domestic politics within Lebanon, the birthplace of much of his family. Moumnen worked on the record over the winter of 2020 and 2021 from his home base of Montréal, linking up with collaborators remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking about the album, Moumnen says: "The Side Two tracks are all named ‘Qalaq’ and then numbered, representing the degrees of layered and complex violence that Lebanon and the Levant have reached in the last couple of years, from the complete and utter failure of the Lebanese sectarian state that has driven the economy to a grinding halt, to its disastrous handling of the migrant influx from neighbouring failed states, to the endemic corruption that led to the August 2020 port explosion, to the latest chapter of Palestinian erasure and yet another brutally asymmetrical and disproportionate bombing campaign on Gaza."
He continues: "I composed the album as a bare skeleton, giving each artist a section to decompose, edit, re-interpret and recompose as they desired, sending me back their stems which I then mixed into my own, remoulding newfound coherences in the overarching composition."
Constellation will release Qalaq on October 8, 2021.
