Biography
Montreal-based musician, producer, and recording engineer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh joins forces with filmmaker Erin Weisgerber, likewise situated in Montreal, to operate the audio-visual performance endeavor Jerusalem in My Heart. The pair has issued material on the city’s independent Constellation Records imprint since 2013. Onstage they construct an enveloping sonic and visual encounter by fusing contemporary experimental Arabic music with hand-processed 16mm analog film imagery projected onto custom screen setups at chosen locations. Their studio output, launched by the 2013 release Mo7it Al-Mo7it, finds Moumneh intertwining “traditional” melismatic vocal lines—almost invariably sung in Arabic—and bouzouki with modular synthesis, filter banks, electronics, field recordings, and additional elements. During performances Weisgerber concurrently alters the photographic, chemical, and physical attributes of 16mm stock, thereby reshaping the environment captured by her lens. The resulting images pulse rhythmically, occupying a zone between representation and abstraction, outer perception and inner terrain.
After issuing a self-titled joint album with Suuns in 2014, JIMH followed with If He Dies, If If If If If If the next year, incorporating further strands drawn from Lebanese folk sources. Their 2018 album Daqa’iq Tudaiq stands as their most conventionally musical statement to date; its opening section consisted of the four-part traditional suite “Wa Ta’atalat Loughat Al Kalam.” The 2021 set Qalaq emerged as an emphatically collective effort that included Greg Fox, Lucrecia Dalt, Moor Mother, and Tim Hecker, among additional contributors.
Jerusalem in My Heart originated in 2005 when Montreal resident and Lebanese national Radwan Ghazi Moumneh established it. Born in Beirut in 1975, he departed the city as a child once Lebanon’s civil war intensified. The family first moved to Oman, Jordan—the initial nation willing to issue them visas—where Moumneh attended a Hindi-language school created for the offspring of Indian domestic workers. In 1993 his family obtained Canadian immigration papers and settled in Montreal shortly after the first Gulf War began. His parents were unable to integrate and returned to Lebanon five years later, while Moumneh stayed to pursue university studies.
Initially Moumneh viewed JIMH chiefly as an art initiative pairing contemporary Arabic and electronic music with 16mm film projections and precisely placed lighting arrays in order to probe the interplay among sound, image, and listeners. By 2012 the experienced engineer and producer had begun developing the project beyond its occasional, location-specific multimedia performances into a recording vehicle that could extend the live audio-visual duo format so that such presentations might be “repeated.” The group gained recognition within Montreal’s art community for stagings that sometimes involved as many as 35 performers. In 2011 Moumneh commenced intensive work in a trio alongside French musician Jérémie Regnier and Chilean filmmaker and visual artist Malena Szlam Salazar; that alliance led JIMH to sign with Constellation Records and issue its debut album, Mo7it Al-Mo7it (Ocean of the Ocean), in March 2013. The ensemble performed throughout Ontario, in selected U.S. and European cities, and in Beirut. Upon returning, Moumneh collaborated with art-punk band Suuns on a favorably received self-titled album recorded at Hotel2Tango, the studio he co-owns and where he serves as sound engineer and producer. The collaborative approach proved freeing. For 2015’s If He Dies, If If If If If If he enlisted guitarists Sharif Sehnaoui and Ian Ilavsky plus percussionist Pierre-Guy Blanchard for selected tracks, after which the project toured North America and Europe, including a visit to Lebanon.
With Daqa’iq Tudaiq in 2018, Moumneh effected a marked change in direction. The album’s first half centered on a twenty-minute orchestral rendering of the Mohammed Abdel Wahab & Ahmad Shawqi classic “Ya Jarata Al Wadi,” retitled “Wa Ta’atalat Loughat Al Kalam,” realized with guitarist Sam Shalabi and a fifteen-piece Lebanese orchestra. While the initial two movements adhered closely to the original score, the instrumental third movement presented a bold rethinking of Arabic motifs and the fourth movement merged both strategies. The remaining half comprised four original pieces rendered in a markedly more experimental manner.
When the COVID-19 pandemic placed the world under lockdown and halted all touring, Moumneh began shaping and writing JIMH’s fifth album, Qalaq, as a counterpart to Daqa’iq Tudaiq—its reflective inverse. He composed using a “dismantled orchestra,” inviting numerous individual musicians, among them Lucrecia Dalt, Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Greg Fox, Alexei Perry Cox, and others, to contribute through internet file exchange. Working from his fully notated source materials on an otherwise open framework, each of the thirteen tracks offered the guest artists freedom to decompose, edit, reinterpret, and recompose at will. Once the parts arrived, Moumneh integrated them into his own arrangements, reshaping and regenerating the compositions under their influence. Qalaq appeared in October 2021 while JIMH was on tour.
After issuing a self-titled joint album with Suuns in 2014, JIMH followed with If He Dies, If If If If If If the next year, incorporating further strands drawn from Lebanese folk sources. Their 2018 album Daqa’iq Tudaiq stands as their most conventionally musical statement to date; its opening section consisted of the four-part traditional suite “Wa Ta’atalat Loughat Al Kalam.” The 2021 set Qalaq emerged as an emphatically collective effort that included Greg Fox, Lucrecia Dalt, Moor Mother, and Tim Hecker, among additional contributors.
Jerusalem in My Heart originated in 2005 when Montreal resident and Lebanese national Radwan Ghazi Moumneh established it. Born in Beirut in 1975, he departed the city as a child once Lebanon’s civil war intensified. The family first moved to Oman, Jordan—the initial nation willing to issue them visas—where Moumneh attended a Hindi-language school created for the offspring of Indian domestic workers. In 1993 his family obtained Canadian immigration papers and settled in Montreal shortly after the first Gulf War began. His parents were unable to integrate and returned to Lebanon five years later, while Moumneh stayed to pursue university studies.
Initially Moumneh viewed JIMH chiefly as an art initiative pairing contemporary Arabic and electronic music with 16mm film projections and precisely placed lighting arrays in order to probe the interplay among sound, image, and listeners. By 2012 the experienced engineer and producer had begun developing the project beyond its occasional, location-specific multimedia performances into a recording vehicle that could extend the live audio-visual duo format so that such presentations might be “repeated.” The group gained recognition within Montreal’s art community for stagings that sometimes involved as many as 35 performers. In 2011 Moumneh commenced intensive work in a trio alongside French musician Jérémie Regnier and Chilean filmmaker and visual artist Malena Szlam Salazar; that alliance led JIMH to sign with Constellation Records and issue its debut album, Mo7it Al-Mo7it (Ocean of the Ocean), in March 2013. The ensemble performed throughout Ontario, in selected U.S. and European cities, and in Beirut. Upon returning, Moumneh collaborated with art-punk band Suuns on a favorably received self-titled album recorded at Hotel2Tango, the studio he co-owns and where he serves as sound engineer and producer. The collaborative approach proved freeing. For 2015’s If He Dies, If If If If If If he enlisted guitarists Sharif Sehnaoui and Ian Ilavsky plus percussionist Pierre-Guy Blanchard for selected tracks, after which the project toured North America and Europe, including a visit to Lebanon.
With Daqa’iq Tudaiq in 2018, Moumneh effected a marked change in direction. The album’s first half centered on a twenty-minute orchestral rendering of the Mohammed Abdel Wahab & Ahmad Shawqi classic “Ya Jarata Al Wadi,” retitled “Wa Ta’atalat Loughat Al Kalam,” realized with guitarist Sam Shalabi and a fifteen-piece Lebanese orchestra. While the initial two movements adhered closely to the original score, the instrumental third movement presented a bold rethinking of Arabic motifs and the fourth movement merged both strategies. The remaining half comprised four original pieces rendered in a markedly more experimental manner.
When the COVID-19 pandemic placed the world under lockdown and halted all touring, Moumneh began shaping and writing JIMH’s fifth album, Qalaq, as a counterpart to Daqa’iq Tudaiq—its reflective inverse. He composed using a “dismantled orchestra,” inviting numerous individual musicians, among them Lucrecia Dalt, Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Greg Fox, Alexei Perry Cox, and others, to contribute through internet file exchange. Working from his fully notated source materials on an otherwise open framework, each of the thirteen tracks offered the guest artists freedom to decompose, edit, reinterpret, and recompose at will. Once the parts arrived, Moumneh integrated them into his own arrangements, reshaping and regenerating the compositions under their influence. Qalaq appeared in October 2021 while JIMH was on tour.
Albums
Daqa'iq Tudaiq
2018
If He Dies, If If If If If If
2015
Suuns and Jerusalem In My Heart
2015
Mo7it Al-Mo7it
2013
Singles
