Judging from their respective recorded output to date, Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart don’t seem to share anything beyond Montreal postal codes. The former is an archetypal indie rock band—four white guys in standard guitar/bass/synth/drums formation, belonging to a distinctly Western tradition of dystopian art-punk. The latter is the multimedia recording project of Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, a producer of Lebanese descent refracting traditional Middle Eastern music through a modernist, avant-garde lens (right down to the numerically dense song titles that reflect Arabic text-speak for sounds not represented by English characters). Suuns release albums through populist indie labels like Secret City (in Canada) and Secretly Canadian (in the United States) and have reached the "what the fuck, we’ll do a Nike commercial" stage of their careers. Moumneh records for the defiantly non-conformist Constellation label, and works as a sound engineer, producer and co-owner at the Godspeed-affiliated Hotel2Tango studio. Suuns thrive on structural linearity and rhythmic precision; Jerusalem in My Heart demonstrates what you can do when you completely disavow both.
But for a city of millions of people, Montreal is a small town when it comes to Anglophone musicians with experimental leanings, and in the case of Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart, there exists not just a mutual-admiration society but a full-blown recording collaboration. The seven pieces on their jointly billed eponymous debut were actually recorded during a week-long session back in November 2012, but put on the backburner as both principals prepped their respective 2013 albums (Suuns’ Images Du Futur and Jerusalem in My Heart’s debut, Mo7it Al-Mo7it). However, the extended gestation period between conception and delivery proves immaterial, because Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart sounds very little like the music either was making on their own at the time of its recording. The album’s success is contingent on the very fact that it never feels like a forced collision of two opposing musical approaches, but rather a natural cultivation of a shared underlying philosophy.
What Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart ultimately do have in common is a desired end goal of transcendence—the former’s two albums to date attempt it through lock-step grooves, synth-throbbed hypnosis, and Ben Shemie’s smeared vocalese; on Mo7it Al-Mo7it, the latter opted for free-form acoustic meditations, analog-electronic oscillations, and equilibrium-upsetting chants. On Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart, the collaborators unite Western rock convention with their ancient old-world antecedents: The appropriately clanging instrumental "Metal" plays like a call-and-response between a distorted Arabic melody—a distant echo of the Syrian wedding-singer boombox bootlegs that are foundational to the JIMH sound—and a mimicking fuzz-toned guitar that effectively turns it into a '60s surf riff. The glitchy and twitchy "Seif" relocates Panda Bear to Beirut; the exhilarating closer "3attam Babey" hits pause on its whirring, motorik, synth-punk drive to accommodate Moumneh’s meditative vocal breaks, before an extended outro fuses them into the same third-eye-prying frequency.
Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart does leave you wondering what more the two entities could have accomplished had they worked on this for more than a week: the ominously intensifying clatter of "Gazelles in Flight" fades out just as the track seems ready to truly take off, while the incongruously off-the-cuff lullaby "Leyla" feels like a rough Suuns song sketch that lacks any of the collaborative frisson heard elsewhere on the record. But for both parties, the benefits of this recording experiment are obvious: For Suuns, it’s an opportunity to break out of their hermetic aesthetic and explore more open-ended modes of composition; for Moumneh, it’s a chance to forsake meticulously crafted soundscapes to indulge his love of raw punk and thumping techno. And whether they’re channeling the serene spirit of '70s krautrock or the corrosive croon of a Damascus busker, the implicit message is the same: for these two, there’s no place like drone.
