Description
Here’s a great sentence: “May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth.” Taken from a Roberto Bolaño manifesto, it’s the name of an ongoing project by the artists Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme. The project is built upon an archive of online recordings, collected primarily in Palestine, Iraq, and Syria. People dance and sing in these recordings, everyday movements and songs that take place at work, at home, outdoors with friends. By archiving these fleeting moments, “May amnesia” insists on the value of these songs, of these lives.
For this compilation, musicians working at the edges of ambient, electronic, and minimal musics responded to the archive, variously ornamenting, armoring, tiering, and submerging the sounds. In many ways, the thing it most reminds me of is Coil’s Musick to Play in the Dark. That record’s lurk and spaciousness, yes, but also the sense of something shared, of deep, human connection being revealed, but also already passed, already out of reach.
The relation also makes sense as Coil’s Drew McDowall is one of the contributors to Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us, offering a patient, midnight zone arrangement of strings. Haykal’s “Nyabi” is similarly layered, zoney, ritual. But the outcomes are boundless, from the untethered knock of DJ Haram’s “Unaccounted” to the clenched-fist gloom of Makimakkuk’s “Bidaeyat” to SCRAAATCH’s bleary, heart-obliterating cover of Rod Lee’s “Dance My Pain Away.” For me the most impactful tracks on Only Sounds are the ones made by Basel and Ruanne. Their connection to the archive provides an unpredictable, divergent intention. It feels like radiation? Like some invisible, looming force, an eldritch warmth, a warning, a promise of unknown change.
Released 2025 by Bilna’es, double LP, gatefold sleeve, black vinyl. Colored vinyl variants available directly from the label HERE
