Constellation Folk 5 Items

Everything Returns reunites the original Black Ox Orkestar lineup following a 15-year hiatus. Arising from the fertile Montréal post-punk agit-prop scene of the early 2000s, the band comprises Scott Gilmore, Jessica Moss and Thierry Amar of Thee Silver Mt. Zion (Amar also continues to compose and play bass for Godspeed You! Black Emperor) and Gabriel Levine of Sackville. Black Ox made two acclaimed albums of roiling acoustic avant-folk in the mid-2000s, exploring Eastern European and North African folkways through the lens of a gritty, resonant indie rock sensibility, juxtaposing interpretations of instrumentals from various Jewish, Romani and Arabic traditions with originals led by Gilmore's politically-charged Yiddish vocals. These early albums have since become lodestars for many among a new generation of Yiddish, Klezmer and radical Jewish diasporic music practitioners and fans. First revealing its resurrection in February 2022 with a surprise flexi 7" single issued by left journal Jewish Currents as a gift to its thousands of subscribers, Black Ox has indeed fully and fruitfully reunited. Exquisitely recorded by Greg Norman (Jason Molina, Nina Nastasia, Electrical Audio), Everything Returns picks up right where the band left off: an incisively atmospheric, melancholic yet resolute album of uniquely modern Jewish folk music, with piano, violin, upright bass, clarinet and cymbalom making up the core instrumentation, and the vocal tunes sung primarily in Yiddish, alongside album centerpiece "Viderkol" and closer "Lamed-Vovnik" where English also features. This is not fusion music, but diaspora music: a cross-cultural call and response of musical lexicons, emerging from the history of Jewish persecution and displacement, the musicology of 19th century repertoire from Jewish shtetls , the improvisational traditions of nusakh in Jewish music and taqsim in Arabic music, and a wider polyglot dialogue of Jewish, Slavic, Arabic, and Central Asian musical traditions. Lyrically and stylistically, Everything Returns connects key current issues_from refugees forced to leave their homes, to the return of fascism and exclusionary nationalism_with the legacy of modernist Yiddish poetry and song. The new Black Ox Orkestar album is a sublime, poetic, politically-informed statement of re-energized diasporic musical intent, where Gilmore's voice and the band's simmering arrangements conjure an ardent, doleful balladry that echoes the sound and sensibility of artists like Tindersticks, The National, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen. Everything Returns is a haunting, richly textured, darkly sparkling song cycle at once from a vanished world and very much of our time and place. Thanks for listening.

Jerusalem In My Heart (Jimh) Is A Live Audio-Visual Performance Project, With Lebanese-Canadian Producer/Musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh And Montréal Based Filmmaker Erin Weisgerber At Its Core. Jimh Is An Immersive Sonic And Visual Live Experience And An Evolving Effort To Forge A Modern Experimental Arabic Music Wed To Hand-Made Visuals Using Analog 16mm Film At Site-Specific Screen Installations. One Of The Most Renowned And Uncompromising Entities Working In 21st Century Avant-Garde Arab-Levantine Art And Music, Jerusalem In My Heart Presents A New Album Of Vital And Haunting Electronics And Electroacoustics, Framed By Founder And Producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh's Spoken And Sung Arabic, Buzuk-Playing And Sound Design. Qalaq Is The Most Distilled, Variegated And Finely Wrought Jerusalem In My Heart Album To Date - Featuring A Different Guest/Collaborator On Every Track, Yet As Cohesive, Emotionally Resonant, Sonically Adventurous And Narratively Powerful As Any Release In Jimh's Celebrated Discography. Guests Across The Album's 13 Tracks Include Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox, Beirut, Alanis Obomsawin, Rabih Beaini And Many More. "Qalaq" Is An Arabic Word With Many Shades Of Meaning But Moumneh Particularly Intends It As "Deep Worry" - On Various Obvious Global Levels, But Also Specifically With Respect To Lebanon: Its Collapsing Domestic Politics, Economy And Infrastructure; The Tragedy And Aftermath Of The 2020 Beirut Port Explosion; The Intractable Geography And Geopolitics That Continue To Condemn The Country To Corruption, Disruption, Destabilization And Violence.

Matana Roberts is one of the most acclaimed, socio-politically conscious and aesthetically intrepid avant-jazz practitioners of the 21st century. Following the critical accolades that the first two Coin Coin chapters have thus far received, the past year has been marked by further career-defining recognition for her body of iconoclastic work: Roberts was a recipient of both the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the Daisy Duke Impact Award in 2014.

Roberts has long employed the phrase “panoramic sound quilting” to describe the process surrounding her Coin Coin work. The third chapter in her Coin Coin series finds Roberts implementing this metaphor most explicitly, constructing a sound art tapestry from field recordings, loop and effects pedals, and spoken word recitations, alongside her saxophone and singing voices. Coin Coin Chapter Three: river run thee could arguably be considered first and foremost a vocal work, and notwithstanding its experimental and esoteric structure, a deeply narrative work as well.