‘Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night’ by Interbellum | Album Premiere
Exclusive album premiere of ‘Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night’ by Interbellumm, a project helmed by Lebanese songwriter Karl-Mattar. Out April 7th, 2023.
‘Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night’ is the third release by Interbellum. Based between Beirut and Berlin, the project blends melodic songs with sonic experimentation. For this album, Mattar is joined by Pascal Semerdjian, drummer for Lebanese dream pop band Postcards. The songs were written and recorded during the Covid lockdowns of 2020-2021 at Mattar’s home in Berlin, with Semerdjian contributing drum parts from his hometown of Ain Aar in Lebanon. The result is songs primarily built around the acoustic guitar, with a freewheeling collage-like approach to the arrangements, and the inclusion of field recordings and samples from a wide variety of sources.
The album builds on previous album ‘Dead Pets, Old Griefs’ (2018, Ruptured). It explores themes of memory, time and trauma – through the notion of ghosts. Within this framework, ghosts represent trauma, the intergenerational transmission of the phantom – a loss that is untellable and therefore inaccessible to the gradual assimilative work of mourning. This psychoanalytical process is at once personal and political. Lebanon’s collective trauma continues to haunt it, with loss upon loss that it is never able to mourn properly. The post-civil-war generation has inherited these ghosts; postmemories buried in crypts. The songs approach the personal as a microcosm of the societal, the family and the state mirroring each other.
Mattar trades the kaleidoscopic pop rock of the previous album for a more organic and anarchic sound, characterized by dense layers of instrumentation, with unexpected sounds appearing and disappearing like ectoplasmic modalizations of past events.
Interbellum was launched in 2015 by Lebanese singer-songwriter Karl Mattar, with a revolving cast of musicians from the Beirut music scene. The first iteration of the group released the lo-fi guitar-driven album ‘Now Try Coughing’ and played its first shows in Beirut in 2016. Sophomore album ‘Dead Pets, Old Griefs’ expanded the project’s palette considerably, adding synthesizers, samples and electronics to the mix.
Headline photo: Roland Ragi
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