Solidarity is Sacrifice | Saverio & Jessika Jamal Khazrik

In this episode, saverio invited Jessika Jamal Khazrik to take over mixed feelings. Her musical practice is devoted to communal solace, collective transcendence, and trans-generational healing – informed by ancestral chanting traditions like Armenian sharakan, Levantine mawwal, and Iraqi radh. In this hour-long episode of mixed feelings, Jessika shares a tribute/revisitation/rendition of the Palestinian folk song Ya Leil Ma'at Walak, along with the trans-millennial Iraqi lullaby دللول Dellelol. Ya Leil Ma'at Walak talks about the pain of dispossession, of displacement in times of war and genocide. دللول Dellelol comes from Sumerian literature, and mothers have sung it for millennia. There are Arabic elements from Jessika’s grandmother’s tongue, Surat, inherited from Akkadian, a language similar to the Kaldian Aramaic. Jessika's work honors a central element of her culture: the commitment to refrain from military operations and instead focus on studying the stars to learn how to improve life on Earth. Jessika has been working only with her voice, and different a cappella recordings of these ancestral songs, deepening a research she started during the summer on the Ya Leil Ma'at Walak version by Reem Banna. Beginning in one stanza, she expanded it in time, working extensively with repetition and frequencies close to the ultrasonic. There are elements in the mix that are higher than the spectrum of what is told as the human range of hearing, offering an anti-normative aural experience.

This episode is mainly in spoken Arabic, mixing classical Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, and Iraqi vernacular Arabic, with spoken words in English. A transcript is available here.

Tracklist