It’s the last day of August and It’s been an eventful summer.
Before anything else: I want to sincerely thank the subscribers who sent over cash for the project I ran with some friends back in Palestine in July. I spent it mostly on USB sticks and you are just terrific. The idea that this silly spiral sletter is now a place I can ask for and recieve material help like that is really quite moving. Thank you. I also borrowed almost all the tech I used for this from dear friends here in Berlin, shout out to Matt and Xavi for the Zooms, and Lisa and her bandmates in Misere who bought me a geofon to record the land (!)
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My first time in the West Bank in August 2022 was a big experience that has, perhaps quite obviously now, changed my life. (My Dad reminded me recently that he took me to ’48 Palestine in 2000, just before the second intifada when I was fourteen, but we crossed the desert not the green line.) To get to go back this summer, see friends again, and be able to offer something hopefully useful to a community who welcomed us with such generosity the first time and now feels like a second home felt incredibly special and I’m still thinking about it.
What do I do when I have a lot to Think About? Make a radio show about it of course. Here’s my newest one all about going back, you may as well start listening while I muse indulgently for a bit and show you some photos.
I’ve set up and run radical social centers and volunteer-led collective spaces with my friends, and been making a general nuisance of myself inside them for twenty years. I know for sure that we do this shit because we are hopelessly addicted to the temporary communal ecstasy they can offer, a horizon beyond the shitsystem, even when the aftertaste is a bitter jade, fraught with comedic levels of psychic overextension, political or interpersonal disillusionment. I’m sure some of my friends would even formulate these places and what they learnt there as having saved their own lives, and I would believe them, and probably look at my hands and nod. What I’m saying is they matter to me.
Stepping into Lajee Center for the first time, another grassroots social center set up by a group of friends with a dream in Aida Refugee Camp in 2000, I was only half surprised to recognise so much of what happened there, how people felt about it. There’s some kinda universal resonance in the beautiful chaos of the places we build because we have to. I’ve written about Lajee an what it means here. As well as music and media, it’s a space that has to provide essential things like food, early years education as well as healthcare. Its youth, leaders and volunteers hold an uncompromising political vision of resistance until liberation, even as all around compromise is made over and over. Its people struggle and live under a murderous military occupation, surrounded on three sides by an apartheid wall. These things make Lajee lifesaving in the literal sense. That’s not only because of these commitments, the models and opportunity it offers to people denied so much of the basics. It’s because when thsee huge blue gates of the military base in front of the center open and the tanks roll in to once again use Aida’s children as target practice, those kids know they can open Lajee’s big metal door.
There’s a danger of gauche slippage in too much comparison like this, and the full weight of reality will probably always be a step beyond my full comprehension. Some gaps are worth respecting. But if anything can get an outsider within inches of a certain contingent kind of ‘knowing’ (if knowing’s even needed, which I contest) then it’s solidarity (which is love) love (which is solidarity) and making music together. It was a wild honour help make this project happen using skills and ideas I learnt mostly by accident in punk and diy spaces. To realise they still work, rough and ready as they remain, can be a tiny bit useful in a place where cultural resistance is not a metaphor, and even work in a swap with young people, freed prisoners, genius women and survivors who all taught us so much more, it felt like deep gift and a culmination, and left me feeling very, very ..something.
Anyway. Bryony. What I mean is I made a radio show with some young people aged 10-16. You can hear that about 20 mins into the The Spiral Times ep.
Here’s what Sounds of Sumud looked like:
It involved teaching them how to use zoom recorders, plan and conduct interviews around camp, and running workshops on things like field recording, Ableton and DJing. With those three things in particular, I am an extreme and perhaps overly proud novice, but when a young man like Omar asks you to teach them how to do a make a beat there is blessedly no time to indulge in self-regarding bourgeois afflictions like imposter syndrome!
He’s a sick dabke dancer and third generation Aida refugee. You can hear his grandmother’s Nakba story on the show. A fellow Shabjdeed stan, here’s the song he made, his first tune and first time using Ableton (and tbf I only figured how to get the midi controller to connect exactly two hours before this so I think it turned out sick!)
The project wasn’t without challenges, occasionally seat-of-our-pants in such a specific environment, always frustrated by my very limited Arabic, yet such a deep joy to be this old and still learning new things about collaboration and working together. My Irish comrades (who are the ‘we’ in all of this) gracefully who put up with living with me and my anxiety for three weeks. The singer and presenter MayKay created an amazing song with the young people, which I think will be the new anthem for Lajee Celtic (that’s a whole amazing story in itself, up the Green Brigade! ) Donncha filmed and created a documentary, Róisín ran incredible Irish language and dance lessons, and Farrell, a social worker and legend, taught a group of 16 year olds how to facilitate a trauma-informed workshop for their peers, to work on rootedness and growth: The Tree of Life.
On the show, you’ll hear these amazing people’s reflections about building on Irish Palestinian solidarity through relationships and creativity, learning from and with young people, and the impact Aida and Lajee have had on them. They also discuss language justice, and the roots of that beautiful connection which go back many decades to different times and to the heart of both struggles.
They speak about the unique bond between Ireland and Palestine, and Donncha tells a mad story that our friend Khaled Al Azraq told him about his friendship with Bobby Sands via smuggled letters when they were both on hunger strike for the same reason thousands of miles apart. You can hear part of that here:
Finally, here’s the tracklist for the bigger show. As you can see, I picked predominantly Palestinian artist doing both freak mode electronics and demented trap. Omar also got some selections in there, and Sinead O’Connor died while we were there so I made a little tribute to her too.
Here’s something approaching a song (???) that I made just from field recordings, called Land. Samer is speaking, his story will be next months’ show. I enjoyed making the Imam sound like a cello and getting that iconic dialtone.
Amateurism forever (headphones better for this)
Postscript:
There’s yet more to be said about the experience of being in Palestine just one week after the unprecedented-since-2002 aerial bombing of the country’s beating heart: Jenin. Everywhere we went the kids were singing songs about Jenin. This time we didn’t get time to go back, but after we left some Lajee volunteers (from this years’ international summer camp) were privileged to be allowed to help with cleaning and planting at the martyr’s cemetary, which has had to be expanded.
You can read something else I wrote about Jenin and a less-discussed aspect of all this, which is what happens to music (10,000 Tape Cassettes, to be precise) and who saves archives when the bombs hit? It’s in Tribune Magazine, here.
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Okay that was probably enough of a mad multimedia download for now. How are you? Please send weird funny film and tv reccs for an exhausted brain and body.
ok bye bb xo