Jerusalem In My Heart

This is the first time that Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête) and Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart) have recorded together as a duo, but the two politically minded artists are long-time friends who have been collaborating in various forms for years. The pair initially began working on pieces together in Montreal back in the summer of 2023, but the project got understandably derailed by the Palestinian genocide, which left Moumneh with “a complete artistic block and the inability to articulate what people are living through.” In the summer of 2024, Oberland invited his friend to Paris in the hopes of reawakening his creative spirit and the two worked “day and night” to shape a new vision together. Notably, Oberland often “took the lead” in steering the album, which was a bit of a pattern-breaking role-reversal for Moumneh (who co-runs the Hotel2Tango studio with members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in addition to his central role in JIMH). The resultant album is quite a freewheeling creative explosion that pushes each artist into compelling and unexpected new terrain.

The most surprising pieces are definitely the first two, as Moumneh’s lead vocals are digitally harmonized in a way that arguably resembles a melancholy robot. While I tend to loathe anything resembling auto-tuned vocals, that bold decision actually serves both pieces quite well, as their melodic vocal hooks provide a nice counterbalance to their more dirge-y/doom-y elements (roiling tremolo-picked guitars, slow-motion drums, distorted bass). Notably, both two pieces are arguably also the most stylistically indebted to Oberland’s Oiseaux-Tempête work, but “Dagger Eyes” in particular blows up that template with a killer mutating synth motif and a structure that blossoms into something resembling futuristic synth-driven Arabic emo. Elsewhere, “The Serpent” is a completely different left-field bombshell, as a buzzing bass throb propels a driving techno groove that unrelentingly snowballs in intensity beneath Moumneh’s digitized and chant-like vocal laments.

In general, however, I tend to prefer the album’s more modest pieces. For example, the improvised-sounding “A Silence With No Ceiling” has some wonderfully soulful saxophone and a killer synth drone that slowly flanges and pans in impressively hallucinatory fashion, while “A Shadow With No Silhouette” is a mesmerizing and intimate-sounding duet between Moumneh’s untreated voice and Oberland’s saxophone. Elsewhere, “A Dream That Never Arrived” beautifully marries a frayed and lo-fi Arabic melody to a slow-motion dancehall beat and a trippy undercurrent of vocal sounds before dissolving into roiling and hissing ambiance. The duo then perfect their ambient side with the closing “Walked and Walked,” as melancholy synth washes rhythmically roll in like ocean waves beneath a sensuous and soulful Middle Eastern melody before the synths swell to a final engulfing intensity. 

Notably, this album has two very different titles: an English one (Eternal Life No End) and an Arabic one (“A dark, cursed night, like the seekers themselves”), which partially conveys the varying emotions and complexities at the heart of these sessions, as Moumneh’s creative reawakening is intertwined with a deep and profound anguish. The music is similarly conflicted, as Eternal Life No End is an uneven yet wildly creative collision of haunting melodies and revelatory ideas mingled with a decent number of decisions that admittedly confounded or wrongfooted me a bit. If this album were less ambitious and intensely soulful, those flaws would probably grate on me, but Moumneh and Oberland were clearly reaching for something transcendent in these dark and turbulent times. While some pieces certainly succeeded more than others in that regard, the heights that they did reach are more than enough to make this a memorably unique, fascinating, and oft-poignant album.

Listen here.