Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (Versions) - LP - Black
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Release Date
06/06/2025
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Limited to 450 copies
Limited to 450 copies.
UPC: 5063176069016
Civilistjavel! x Mayssa Jallad's 'Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (Versions)' is a radical response to Mayssa Jallad's 2023 original LP, a lyrical account of epochal events in Beirut at the dawn of Lebanon's civil war. '...(Versions)' sees Civilistjavel! (aka Swedish producer Tomas Boden) apply a stripped, dub methodology to Mayssa's rich stems, refracting the Arabic source through the hazy prism of Northern European electronica. Retaining 'Marjaa...'s deep spatial framing and vaporous, shifting nature, traces are lifted and set down in a new landscape: a ghost of a ghost. Informed by Tomas' singular strand of ambient, minimalist, dub techno, '... (Versions)' recalls the reductive, shimmering pulse of pioneering Berlin-based practitioners Basic Channel/Chain Reaction, but with the parameters stretched into the ether. Where versions typically focus on a rhythm, here the anchor is the tone and texture of Mayssa's voice, around which a new world has been constructed. Disembodied and liminal, it conjures an eerie panorama that feels like a postscript to the original, further emphasizing the geopolitical events that have had such devastating effect in Mayssa's homeland of Lebanon since that record's release. 'Marjaa...' (tr. 'reference') combined Mayssa Jallad's two main vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. The album was co-written with Fadi Tabbal and based on Mayssa's Historic Preservation master's thesis ('Beirut's Civil War Hotel District: Preserving the World's First High-Rise Urban Battlefield'). The thesis examined a 5-month conflict that took place within Beirut's skyscraper-laden luxury hotel district of Minet El Husn near the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Addressing a post-war generation who have never been taught this difficult history, 'Marjaa...' was an attempt to process trauma, and "a call to protest for the renewal, rather than the recycling of the political class that once destroyed the country and holds us, to this day, hostage of its...