Radwan Ghazi Moumneh
Radwan Ghazi Moumneh is a Lebanese-Canadian producer/musician based in Tiohtiá:ke/Montréal. He melds Arabic song traditions with modern deployments of electronics and synthesis, while utilizing the traditional folkloric disciplines – the buzuk (Lebanese luth) and Arabic modal singing.
In the early 2010s, he founded the audiovisual duo Jerusalem In My Heart (JIMH). The duo is an always-evolving effort to forge a modern experimental Arabic music and fuse it with analog film in order to produce multimedia works of intensive cross-cultural and socio-political artistry. For this duo, Moumneh creates all the music and collaborates with a filmmaker (Malena Szlam in 2013, Charles-André Coderre from 2014 to 2019 and Erin Weisgerber since 2019). As JIMH, he has released four acclaimed albums on Montréal experimental label Constellation in the past decade. JIMH has been a guest curator at Le Guess Who?, appeared at CTM, Big Ears, Rewire, FIMAV, Supersonic, Clandestino, Sonic City and Transmissions among many other avant-music festivals.
JIMH’s fourth album Qalaq was released in 2021 to critical acclaim; it features collaborations with a wide range of artists including Moor Mother, Tim Hecker, Lucrecia Dalt, Greg Fox and Rabih Beaini. “Qalaq” is an Arabic word with a meaning Moumneh particularly intends as “deep worry”; on various universal levels (needless to say) but also specifically with respect to Lebanon/Beirut, its collapsing domestic politics, economy and infrastructure, tragic geopolitics, and the desperate extremisms rending all of its adjacent states. Framed by Moumneh’s spoken and sung Arabic, buzuk and sound design, Qalaq is a visceral and haunting work of contemporary electronics, Arabic songcraft and sound art.
Radwan Ghazi Moumneh’s unique musical sensibility also sprawls outward. As a prolific producer and co-owner of the Hotel2Tango studio, he has recorded and produced a long list of albums, by Mashrou’ Leila, Silver Mt Zion, Big Brave, Marie Davidson, Tim Hecker, Lou Doillon, SUUNS, Fly Pan Am, and the Coin Coin series by Matana Roberts, to name just a few.
Overall, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh has created a body of work that challenges and re-imagines Arabic contemporary music. Outside of JIMH, he has contributed to several collaborative recordings on various other imprints. He is now working on his first solo album.
Press Links
Fifteen Question with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh – No longer disposable