Jerusalem in My Heart / gamut inc "dreaming of electric sheep again"

Jerusalem In My Heart is a live audio­visual performance project with Lebanese-born Canadian producer and musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and filmmaker Charles­André Coderre at its core. A fixture of the Montreal independent music community from his early days, Moumneh is also active in the Beirut and Lebanese experimental music scenes, bringing influences from both into Jerusalem in My Heart. Through the project, which takes its name from a civil-war period album by the beloved Lebanese singer, Fairouz, Moumneh attempts to forge a modern experimental Arabic music that weds evocative singing in classical Arabic modes to electronic compositions. Together with Coderre’s hand­made visuals using analogue 16mm film and slide projectors over a multiple screens, the artists create an immersive sonic and visual live experience.

Joining Jerusalem in my Heart are gamut inc, a Berlin-based ensemble whose navigation of unfamiliar territory takes the form of a kind of sonic archaeology; they uncover pre-modern music-making technologies and concepts that embody a similar conceptual or experimental rigor as the contemporary avant-garde, and combine them with recent technology to build stunning electroacoustic instruments bridging the very old and the very new. For their CTM 2016 appearance, gamut inc present some of their newest machines — including a noise generator built of multiplied cabasas, pitch-shifting timpani with multiple solenoid beaters and a miniature carillon, and a glockenspiel-like instrument in which metal bars are hit on different positions by computer-controlled solenoids — for the first time in Berlin. In addition to their HAU concert, gamut inc introduce into their instruments and the underlying methodology in a presentation within the CTM 2016 MusicMakers Hacklab. Details on the festivals’s website.

CTM Festival returns to HAU Hebbel am Ufer from 30 January to 7 February. The 17th edition’s music programme is elaborated through intensive collaboration with guest co-curator Rabih Beaini, while the exhibition and discourse programme is created in close collaboration with Swiss-based Norient. Special projects and commissions, as well as artists and sound cultures emanating from less familiar countries and localities and often operating on the fringes of the electronic circuit are featured in greater numbers than ever before. Under the shadow of a global conflict centered on increasingly radical disputes over drawing or dissolving borders, the festival’s “New Geographies” theme aims to explore music and sound practices that respond to these developments, and to provide the conceptual tools needed to approach the complexities of a polycentric, polychromatic, and increasingly hybrid (music) world with greater openness.

The full festival programme is available via: www.ctm-festival.de.

Supported by the Embassy of Canada and the Quebec Delegation of Berlin.

CTM 2016 is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media, the Musicboard Berlin and the Creative Europe programme of the European Union. In collaboration with transmediale, Kulturprojekte Berlin, SHAPE and SoCCoS.