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(2023) Mayssa Jallad – Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels
Review:
The Battle of the Hotels was a vicious conflict that took place in Beirut at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War, between October 1975 and March 1976, in which, at least initially, opposing militias fought bitterly for possession of a small hotel complex. If it sounds like a scenario from the imagination of JG Ballard, it’s also a very real and grisly reminder of the absurd horror of war. In this succinct yet powerful concept album, Beirut-based singer-songwriter Mayssa Jallad attempts to critically examine this violent episode’s cultural and political legacy. It is, as one might expect, a sombre affair largely comprised of Jallad’s delicate vocals backed by acoustic guitar and ethereal synthesizer. Elsewhere, co-composer and producer Fadi Tabbal adds the crackle of distant artillery and a ghostly wind between the high-rise blocks while Farah Kaddour evokes more ancient landscapes with the brittle plucking of a buzuk. The inclusion of lyrics translated from the Arabic makes it clear that this is a defiant ultimatum, calling for the removal of the still-ruling political class that makes such savage folly possible: ‘The war will not end / As long as we vote for the Reds and Blues.’ — songlines.co.uk
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…The album, like the city at the time, is divided into two parts. The first part “Dahaliz” (“Corridors”) leads listeners through Beirut as Jallad tries to compare the present-day Beirut to a 1930s map of the city she used to find a very specific Holiday Inn; “The Holiday Inn is one of the first skyscrapers in Beirut,” Jallad says, “and it’s the main focal point that I’m studying in my album. I was looking for the hotel on the map and I couldn’t find it. What I did find is in the third song on the album, ‘Baynana.’” What Jallad found was the St. Charles Hospital which, in the early 1970s, had transformed into a luxurious hotel that eventually became a killing machine. The album’s at times serene, at times dramatic music is constructed to reflect the spaces and events being described in the text. Jallad’s vocalizations specifically stress the consonants in the words, stripping out the vowels, “I’m trying to remove any spaces in between, and leave the void to resonate,” she says. The album brought together a group of players who have been the cornerstone of Beirut’s music scene for the last two decades. Lebanese oud player and composer Youmna Saba accompanies Jallad on “Etel” and “Kharita” as she tries to make sense of a city in chaos. Fadi Tabbal, who produced the album, was equally instrumental in shaping its sounds. The album’s second half plunges into the depths of the battle—or “Maaraka”; its tracks are structured chronologically to reflect pivotal moments within the five-month span the album covers. During our stroll through Beirut, Jallad and I eventually end up in front of another significant building in Beirut: Burj El Morr. The monstrous building’s dark windows look down on us threateningly as the sound of trucks rolling over asphalt, car horns, and people talking surround us. These sounds can also be heard on the track named for the building. “I imagined Burj El Morr as a space where you had to climb up the stairs, so the sounds [on that song] are very truncated,” Jallad says. “Whereas in the Holiday Inn, the sounds are more ‘flowy,’ to reflect on the abundance of space and its wealth.” Both historically and on the album, the divisions in the city are embodied by two groups: The “reds” and the “blues.” As Jallad explains, “The reds are the left. They were against the blues, who were the Christian militias who believed that the Palestinian cause was not theirs. My lyrics explain a lot of the dynamic, and the way I sing describes the tensions. In the lyrics, I become the buildings. So I sing: ‘A red hides in my body/ He climbs my spine/ He breathes heavily down my lungs/ He reaches my head/ Looks through my eyes,’ [which is] an allusion to the Burj El Morr building.” The two buildings—The Burj El Morr and the Holiday Inn—were part of a luxurious hotel district, but they became the center point of urban warfare; nearly 200 people were taken hostage in the Holiday Inn. Together, they embody a looming presence of the past. “It’s the most difficult thing that I ever had to write,” Jallad says. “The research was difficult too because I found out things that I had no clue about. It made me feel like I’d been lied to all of my life. One of the main moments for me was when I discovered the details of a massacre that happened near the port. It wasn’t organized—it was started by the father of a Christian phalangist [a member of the Lebanese Social Democratic Party]. He had lost his son when someone kidnapped him That father was convinced that [his son was kidnapped] because he was Christian. Two months later, he found out that his second son was kidnapped and killed. He went insane and started a massacre where 300 Muslims were killed based on their religion in an hour and a half. I found that out when I was at grad school, and this was totally devastating for me.” That story is embedded within “Markaz Azraq,” where deeply sentimental strokes of electric guitar—slowly escalating and intermingling with the distant drones—serve as a reminder of the lingering violence. The album’s penultimate track was produced with the electronic musician Sary Moussa. “We kind of thought of it as a howling track,” Jallad says. “There are 15 vocal layers on it, and there are echoes following echoes—some of them you can barely hear, and some of them are very deep and dramatic.” As the album draws to a close, Jallad takes on the role of first-person narrator to summarize the legacy that has been left to her generation. She tells listeners that, “This was the first high-rise battle, and they study it in the American military. We have inherited it, while they tried to erase it.” In the end, the album, like the city on which it is based, feels like an infinite loop of history, relayed through the brave yet saintly voice of an artist who has taken the task of documenting the past through music. — daily.bandcamp.com
Track List:
01 - Etel
02 - Kharita
03 - Baynana
04 - Mudun
05 - Haigazian (October 22)
06 - Burj al Murr (October 25 to 27)
07 - Markaz Azraq (December 6)
08 - Markaz Ahmar (December 6 suite)
09 - Al Hisar (December 8)
10 - Holiday Inn (January to March)
11 - Holiday Inn (March 21 to 29)
12 - Al Irth
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, ambient, world
Country: Beirut, Lebanon
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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