nakazakichō

Pre-order: 12th January 2023
Release date: 20th January 2023
Format: CD, Digital

Everyday life is often filled with many small anxieties that we deal with by simply pretending they do not exist.
Sometimes they thicken beyond the horizon of our field of vision, turning into a sense of impending danger, a floating leviathan, an immense bird of prey hiding in the clouds above the skyscrapers ready to grab us. Our only defence is to try to ignore it, hoping that oblivion will slowly devour it, relegating it to another plane of existence.

And sometimes, it is simply like dreaming of suffocating...

Copyright © 2023 ROHS! RECORDS, All Rights Reserved

previews. Macrogramma - Asphyxia | Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series

Boomamb

Train to Dinagy

Elements - Available on Bandcamp

Psync opath

The village stood on the slope of a steep hill and faced north-northwest, overlooking Wadi Salman. The Jerusalem-Jaffa highway ran immediately southwest of it, and dirt paths linked it to a group of neighboring villages. Although the identification of the village has been debated by biblical scholars, Lifta is believed to have been established on the site of Mey Neftoach, a source of water near Jerusalem. The site retained this name during the Roman period and was called Nephto during the Byzantine era. Almost nothing is known about the village in the early Islamic period; however, during the Crusades the village was referred to as Clepsta.

The fighting in Lifta, as well as the adjacent Jerusalem districts of Rumayma and Shaykh Badr, was triggered by the Haganah in the earliest days of the war. The History of the Haganah states that “Securing the western exit of the city [of Jerusalem] entailed the eviction of Arabs from Romema and Shaykh Badr. Afterwards, the Arabs also vacated Lifta.“ Other sources supply further details. According to Israeli historian Benny Morris, the Haganah fired the first shots in December 1947, killing the Palestinian owner of a filling station in Rumayma, on the grounds that he was suspected of informing Arab forces about the departure of Jewish convoys to Tel Aviv. The next day, a grenade was thrown at a Jewish bus.

Palestinian historian ‘Arif al-‘Arif adds that a coffeehouse in Lifta was attacked on 28 December with Sten guns and submachine-guns, and that six of the patrons were killed and seven wounded. The New York Times account puts the number of dead at five, adding that members of the Stern Gang halted their bus outside the cafe, sprayed the patrons with machine-gun fire and threw grenades.

Al-‘Arif writes that most of the residents of Lifta left after the attack on the coffeehouse and the rest evacuated soon afterwards. These actions were followed by a number of others, with the Haganah, Irgun Zvai Leumi, and Stern Gang repeatedly raiding both Rumayma and Lifta. In neighboring Shaykh Badr, the Haganah blew up the house of the mukhtar on 11 January, and two days later launched a second raid in which twenty houses were damaged. Most houses on the eastern periphery of Lifta were also demolished. Morris adds that the purpose of these demolitions was to turn the Palestinian residents out of their homes; to a large extent, this goal was achieved. By 7 February 1948, Jewish Agency chairman David Ben-Gurion expressed his satisfaction with the results of the attacks at a meeting of Mapai party leaders: “From your entry into Jerusalem through Lifta - Romema, through Mahane Yehuda, King George Street and Mea Sharim - there are no strangers. One hundred percent Jews.“

sraeli Settlements on Village Lands
The settlements of Mey Niftoach and Giv’at Sha’ul were built on village lands and now have become parts of the suburbs of Jerusalem.

The Village Today
Most of the houses remaining on the site are deserted, although some have been restored for the use of Jewish families. A basin that had been built around the spring in Wadi al-Shami lies in ruins. The mosque and the village club are still visible, north of the spring. Adjacent to the mosque, on the western side, is a cemetery covered with bushes and wild grass. The village orchard of  fig and almond trees is located at the bottom of a wadi along a stream flowing from the spring. Jewish families have moved into three of the old village houses. The ruins of other houses are visible in various parts of the site. In 1987, the Israeli Nature Reserves Authority planned to restore the “long-abandoned village“ and and to turn it in an open-air natural history and study center that would “stress the Jewish roots of the site.“ This project, with an estimated cost of $10 million, would be financed from donations.

BedouinDrone - Lifta

Improvised track "mélofaune" as played on May 18, 2023, with:
- Fred Aerden (processed field recordings)
- Antonin De Bemels (groovebox)
- Philippe Van Bellinghen (cello + fx) https://soundcloud.com/philvanb2712

Picture by Pauline De Bemels

Le début

Mélofaune

Before any action, the echoes have already begun. The forms of thought move gently in the stillness, forming rhythms of internal syntax and silent memory. Each note unfolds like a whisper from within: a pulse that lives between moments, before the page is turned, before anything begins.

Elements - Available on Bandcamp

7NINE