Over several years, Mo’min Swaitat has amassed an archive of rare tapes and vinyl from Palestine and beyond, spanning field recordings of weddings to revolutionary tracks and synth-heavy 80s funk. Many of these were acquired from a former record label in Jenin in the north of the West Bank. The Majazz Project is a research project borne out of the archive, focused around sampling, remixing and reissuing vintage Palestinian and Arabic cassettes. It is a collaboration between Arab and non-Arab DJs, producers and artists interested in shedding new light on the richness and diversity of Arabic musical heritage. The aim behind Majazz Project is to safeguard the Palestinian sound archive and to make it more accessible in online and physical formats. It is also an outreach research project to connect Palestinian bands from the 60s, 70s and 80s with new audiences and to make their music available through streaming platforms both in their original form and reinterpreted and remixed by DJs, artists and musicians.
Seeing Through Flames is a series of auditory assemblages that turn listening into a collective channel of exchange. These sessions open out the ideas and themes of our research strand, Emergency & Emergence, and survey different possibilities of forming solidarity through sound and music. By looking at politics of spiritual transformation and collective imagination, these study-as-listening sessions explore the potential for the poetic and vibrational undoing of the knowledge that underpins concepts of the dominant modes of being, as well as the oppression those modes create to make ourselves and our planet anew.