An electro-acoustic performance composition for trumpet and field recordings of bombardment, sirens, TV clips, phone calls and the social geography of Beirut during the 2006 war, re-membered amidst the unchanging same of settler colonial violence 20 years later.

Overview

Moving, beautiful and devastating, Mazen’s Starry Night is a 6 minute ‘minimalistic improvisation by: Mazen Kerbaj/trumpet, the Israeli air force/bombs’, made during the 2006 Israeli war against Hezbollah. It’s the most affecting field recording we’ve heard in the last 20 years. As fighter jets targeted the city, Mazen sat on his balcony and defiantly improvised with the bombardment. We once heard him talk about this as trying to knock the jets out of the sky with his trumpet.

20 years on—while Beirut is again bombed by Israeli jets—Before the War… expands on Starry Night to include other recordings Mazen made in 2006: conversations, TV news, radio songs, bombardments and the reactions they create (sirens, dogs barking). It gives more space to the shared soundscapes that define lives in the city: a psychic geography shaped by the cumulative impact bombs have on the collective will.

Context

As the title Before the War… makes plain, the war didn’t start in 2023 or 2006; and it is not over now. By listening back to empire, the cyclical nature of colonial conflict is revealed: so-called ceasefires or peace being just another stage of the same eliminationist process. Refuting this linear hegemony that seeks to make what comes next a foregone conclusion, and by collaging personal and collective history into a counter-story to intervene in dominant fraudulent narrative of denial, Before the War… sonically maps out an anti-colonial time of return and resistance.

The music programme at Episode 12 has emerged as a collaboration with the UK’s best experimental music festival, Counterflows.

Content Notes: Loud noises including sounds of explosions and sirens.