Eternal Life No End | ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيه documents the debut, electroacoustic duo album of Lebanese-Canadian, Montréal-based producer, guitarist, and vocalist Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, known for his work as the experimental audio-visual project Jerusalem In My Heart, and French, Paris-based composer, multi-instrumentalist, and visual artist Frédéric D. Oberland, of the post-rock band Oiseaux-Tempête. The album was created in 2024 and 2025. Moumneh and Oberland collaborated before on Oiseaux-Tempête albums.
The Arabic title of Eternal Life No End translates more literally as «A dark, cursed night, like the seekers themselves». The album is an outcry amidst the oceans of injustice flooding the Southwest Asia and North Africa region, including the genocide in Gaza, lamenting our supremacist and genocidal political present that haunts the lives and visions of vast populations. Moumneh and Oberland think of this album as their version of Dante’s Inferno – a dense and tortured emotional vortex, where dream-time seeps into trance-like, repetitive percussion patterns and urgent, hypnotic, and electric themes that ripple through Moumneh’s heavily processed voice and the Arabic lyrics.
The album reflects a sea of sickness currently drowning the state of humanity through seven poetic pieces that morph between the sensory and the suppressed. The centerpiece, «The Serpent – بسمة افعى», will be accompanied by an audio-visual essay assembled by Oberland. Shot in Montréal, Paris, and Beirut, the essay includes footage of Gaza protests in Paris and of the Frequent Defect event at Irtijal Festival’s 25th anniversary edition in Beirut. Lebanese graphic designer and calligrapher Farah Fayyad did the talisman-like cover artwork featuring entwined serpents.
But Eternal Life No End is not only about pain and the immeasurable losses of human life, even though at times it sounds as if it drowns – literally – in oceans of sad, vulnerable sounds. It evokes shamanic exhortations of evil and channels memory and devotion into inventive and disruptive action, and listening to the plight of the weak, poor, and unprivileged as a compassionate act that, hopefully, may transfigure reality and social amnesia.
Eyal Hareuveni
Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (voice, buzuk, rababa, synthesizers, drum machines, percussion), Frédéric D. Oberland (Buchla & modular synths, drum machines, synthesizers, alto saxophone, clarineau, bells)
