Only sounds that tremble through us is part of the ongoing project from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. This evolving work, has taken on multiple forms that intersect and overlap; an online project (mayamnesia.com), installations and a series of public performances.

The album Only sounds that tremble through us is a double LP. The first record features a full album of compositions by Abbas and Abou-Rahme, developed as part of the project between 2022-2024, while the second record is an album made up of commissioned compositions by Hiro Kxone, Drew McDowall, Makimakkuk, Julmud, Haykal, SCRAAATCH, Muqata’a, Freddie June, and DJ Haram in conversation with the project. The artists invited have all had a long engagement with the wider project, several of these artists had been invited by Abbas and Abou-Rahme to perform in the installation as part of the exhibitions of the work, whilst others are featured in the work itself. The artists in this double LP take the wider project and archival material as a conceptual and at times a literal starting point (through sampling, and synthesis) for their compositions.

The wider project begins with a collection of online recordings of unknown figures (mostly from Palestine, Iraq and Syria) performing through song, music and dance either in the intimacy of their homes, or on a street, in a square, at a wedding or on a beach having just found refuge. It takes these moments as the basis for new performances developed with electronic musicians and a dancer in Palestine (Makimakkuk, Julmud, Haykal and Rima Baransi), responding to specific gestures, music or texts from the archive. May amnesia examines the place and significance of voice in the form of song and oral poetry and body in the form of dance and gesture as a political act of embodiment and becoming in a moment marked by various forms of colonial violence against entire living fabrics. The project repositions these moments as a material witness inscribed through body, movement, rhythm and voice to the destruction of everyday life that is occurring or has occurred. Equally it is also one of the most critical ways in which these fractured communities are resisting their own erasure and laying claim to space, self and community once more. Often quite literally embodying and performing through their bodies and voice within and against these violences through renewed rituals of movement and song. At times splintering, even if momentarily, the various regimes of power that have rendered them uncounted, inaudible.

commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation

released May 30, 2025

Artwork by Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas
Mastered by Kelly Hibbert (Almachrome)

Bilna’es, 2025