My track “The Sign to Return is in the Earth’s Spin” is composed solely of sounds from Lebanese improviser Mazen Kerbaj’s trumpet. The album concept is collaborative (remotely, borne of lockdown and true internationalism) and provides exciting and at once contemplative results.
Thinking on my visits to Palestinian refugee camps in my last two visits to Kerbaj’s city of Beirut, I picked a tempo that might connotate a celestial turn, reflected in humans’ own inner core, our cells but a microcosm of the great heaving planet that hosts us. For me this track is a continuation of an idea, a feeling begun on my solo album (Bradley-Weaver) “Systems for a Score” with the track “May The Future Keep Its Core”. Composed by myself and co-edited and co-produced with Chris Weaver, the piece is a cry for integrity. Integrity in materiality, in choices vis a vis the environment and what we understand of it, in our role in preserving it. It is a purring ode to slowness, echoing over millennia, cadences rising and falling in space, speeding up to the crashing, the unstoppable ‘now’. Inevitability drives the return, a circular motion truly planetary in its sonic scope. To me the Palestinian yearning for the right to return, was a microcosm of humankind’s innate need for circularity.
Morphine Records in Berlin have dropped the massive collaboration as a CD, double vinyl or digital release. Featured are Muquta’a (Palestine), Dj Sniff (Japan), Microhm and many others of note.
