Exploring the universal consciousness of monorhythms

The final show in this year’s New World series derives universal possibilities from the relentless pulsations of minimalism and the fluidity of collective music making.

Jerusalem In My Heart forges a modern experimental Arabic music by wedding melismatic singing in classic Arabic styles with throbbing electronic production. They interweave their musical content with 16mm film projections and light-based (de)constructions of space, exploring a relationship between music, visuals, projections and audience. No two JIMH events are alike. JIMH’s vocals and purposefully blown-out sonic sensibility have been the consistent thread, but neither its music nor visual propositions have ever repeated themselves. This was one of the reasons why JIMH resisted for eight years any official documentation or definitive recording of the project until releasing Mo7it Al-Mo7it on Constellation in March 2013.

JIMH was formed in 2005 by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, a Lebanese national who has spent a large part of his adult life in Quebec and has been a fixture of the Montreal independent music community since the 90s, most notably over the last decade as a sound engineer, producer and co-owner of Montreal’s Hotel2Tango recording studio. Moumneh is also active in the Beirut experimental music scene. JIMH now consists of a core trio with French musician & producer Jérémie Regnier and Chilean visual artist & filmmaker Malena Szlam Salazar, whose two-year collaboration with Moumneh has resulted in the co-creation of JIMH’s debut album.

Exploring the powerful repetitive nature of the monorhythm, a single, non-syncopated pulse, Steve Kado has been composing and performing extremely repetitive music for the last year. All his work in this direction shares a single title, 2003. These efforts have ranged from works for solo drum machine or solo breathing to large ensemble pieces for large, casually organized groups of musicians playing large varieties of instruments in a variety of contexts. While the solo works speak to an extremely focused personal masochism, the group works utilize the open and ‘democratic’ structures pioneered by Terry Riley in works like “In C” to govern the complex interactions of the large and shifting ensemble.

Doors 7pm / Concert 8pm

Tickets $20 Regular / $10 Member

$15 Advance at Soundscapes or musicgallery.org