This album is dedicated to jaimie branch.

LINER NOTES

To the people of eternity

The national anthem of Palestine calls out repeatedly to “my people, the people of eternity.”

The songs on this album are presented here in service of their liberation. In listening, you will deepen your knowledge of the fact that music is a powerful site for a freedom that’s both specific to an occupied place and voluminous in reach. You find yourself turning, turning around inside many deep strata at once. Dancing maybe, aligning your breath with a hundred different intertwined rhythms.

There are sonic references to realities of life under siege and occupation – the regular intervals of shudders of gunfire punctuating Dakn’s track, the rumbling of embattled voices shouting. Voices, aggrieved or battle ready, emerge from under near the end of Speaker Music’s Holosonic Rebellion.

jaimie branch’s trumpet breaks onto a moment of the American military dirge Taps – the triplets of America – military – death so involved – in the middle of a vibrant polyphonic home that Anteloper created in Hideouts. There’s no way not to be physically moved by that track. The album as a whole is also dedicated to the memory of breezy – jaimie branch – who in the recent past was so alive, playing tambourine at a protest for Palestine.

Noise, rousing beats of varying style, aggression, and gentleness are nestled next to sounds that can only be described in shades of beauty, such as the entirety of Amir ElSaffar’s Reaching Upward. ElSaffar, a brilliant jazz trumpeter, builds on ancient Iraqi forms of music like maqam, creating warmth and contemporary complexity. Meditations here take multiple forms – sparse, driving melodic and warm, steady staticky bass as a voice repeats variations in the present tense / The present / The presence / The presences – the present is … And there’s a calm, hypnotic cavern to be found in tracks like Marcy Angeles’ A Human is a Human is a Human, and so too, deep attention presented in a more up-tempo way, in Baraari’s Juwa El Ard – a journey from air to land.

In reciting Apologies, an abundant noise takes over. Deep into Intramaterial, a faint melody appears under pillows of static sound. Another track (you’ll listen to find out which one) ends with the surprise of a short human gasp.

You can no more pin a genre on so many calls to freedom than anyone can contain the promise of liberation with campaigns for erasure. In compiling this album, Sanna Almajedi and Gavilán Rayna Russom – each connected to this struggle by proximity of birth and strength of commitment – looked to artists doing radical things with musical structure. As Rayna has put it, the resulting tracks echo a resistance to colonization in their resistance of structure, in the very essence of their radical rhythm. The music expresses solidarity through deep and deepening means that transcend categorization or geography. The musicians sent in work from all over, and many participated for the first time for an album for Palestine. Why did Mercury Symbol, from the Bronx, Rayna asked in reflecting on the album you’re hearing now, want to make a track in support of BDS? She answered that he’s a person with a strong sense of community who believes in liberation. And who, like you, knows music is a way in and forward. Rhythm is a transmitter of information: a speaking of truth to a set of powerful realities occupying the present.

In a way, listening to the tracks compiled here mirrors the experience of hearing stories of and from Palestine. You cannot listen once without being changed. And you can only ever know them by returning, return, again, again …

“Carried by the ocean waves we will rise, we will rise,” Amirtha Kidambi sings on Dance of the Subaltern. “Buried by the ocean waves we will drown, we will drown …” The same waves can carry or drown the people of eternity, and in the ways that we’re connected, all of us. Jumping in headfirst to survive walls of water, or more crucially, to topple heavy concrete, requires the power and freedom of boundless rhythms. And they will be sounded together.

- Kaye Cain-Nielsen


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Proceeds from BDS Mixtape’s sales and streaming support cultural initiatives in Palestine through Adalah-NY’s Amplify Palestine campaign. All digital music purchases are fully tax-deductible and are processed by Adalah-NY's fiscal sponsor, WESPAC Foundation (tax ID number: 13-3109400).