What is the role of the artist in a world where 320-megabits-per-second of a ballistic missile exploding and the bleating of a checkpoint siren communicate all that we could ever possibly need to hear? What is left to record once an orphan’s pleas have been caught on tape? A mother’s voice emanates from Gaza as an echo of her sister in stolen lands and under burning rainforests, spoken in a different language. When Palestine cries, so does the world. At the time of this writing, a so-called ceasefire has just been called, and the genocide in Gaza has been going on for over 450 days, a period of time over which the cellphone videos sent to the global north from that tiny, precious speck of land in the center of the world became increasingly, unfathomably violent. Comfortable in our homes on a faraway continent, we became disturbed by these unbelievable images and sounds, which are so twisted and obscene as to rend our own understanding of the universe. Yet in their depiction of a cruel reality, one that is in fact more actual, more real, than the surreal life inside the imperial core, they are so plain. Their plainness is so striking as if to shatter our culture’s worship of false images. Earth Amulets is a compilation album whose sale proceeds will be sent to two organizations: Beirut Synth Center and Tunefork Studios*, and Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity. This album is an effort to contribute an eddy in the ocean that is Palestinian liberation. Through the process of feeling and creation, it links together the artists -- to the people who will be listening to this album -- to the people who will be contributing money to the project -- to the recipients of the funds in Palestine and Lebanon -- to everyone else who is touched by the project -- and so on. Through the energetic conduit, we are connected to the Palestinians in Gaza. The money and sound, mere currents in an electrical field. Another current, the signal from the White House to open fire. Perhaps the two threads of data meet and intermingle, their waveforms crisscrossing in the empty air between satellites high above our heads where the drones fly, or snaking together in vast cables beneath the saltwater, only to separate like mother and child, arriving at their destinations, far from their origins, transforming into a real, material consequence of flesh and blood and bones and metals and changed minds and moved hearts. Earth Amulets is but one current made audible. It is part of our intangible and collective melancholy and grief and hope that exists in between the wooden podia and the police batons and the gunpowder and the phosphorus. When words fail to come -- because, what else is left to be said, once an image of what we have seen even exists -- one still expresses, for where else might it go?
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