RADWAN GHAZI MOUMNEH AND FRÉDÉRIC D. OBERLAND - Eternal Life No End

Best known for the project Jerusalem In My Heart, Lebanese musician Radwan Ghazi Moumneh – already the owner of Montreal's celebrated Hotel2Tango studio, a stone's throw from Constellation Records – boasts an artistic and cultural profile of rare significance. His career has never lacked daring and courage, two elements that now lay the groundwork for "Eternal Life No End", an album shared with Frédéric D. Oberland, co-founder of France's Oiseaux-Tempête.

Geographically distant but conceptually akin, the two artists find themselves united and profoundly shaken by the horror of the war devastating the Palestinian people. Developed over the past two years, "Eternal Life No End – ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيها" finds its key in the Arabic title, which translates roughly as "A dark, cursed night, like those who seek it": an emotional state that resonates with surgical precision across the record's seven tracks.
The creative process draws on strikingly powerful timbral contrasts. On "Dagger Eyes – عيون ملأَى طعون", traditional Middle Eastern percussion, such as the daf and bongos, collides with the dark, jagged textures of synthesizers. This tension becomes even more radical on "The Serpent – بسمة افعى", a track with near-industrial leanings, in which icy rhythmic and electronic geometries provide the backdrop to a spectral vocal, entirely filtered through vocoder.

In this scenario, reflection turns into a scream. Avant-folk and psychedelia shed every earthly connotation to embrace an arcane, sorrowful spirituality, where melancholy forsakes any form of sharing until it breaks apart and dissolves.
In giving shape to anguish, Moumneh and Oberland build unprecedented, disorienting postmodern liturgies, capable of setting the glow of electronics in dialogue with Arabic melodies of piercing beauty, as happens on "A Dream That Never Arrived – حلم لا يجيء".
Rather than blind rage, the duo favors the path of meditation. That much is proven by the magical duet between buzuk and saxophone on the placid "A Silence With No Ceiling – لا للصمت سقف", and confirmed by the moving intensity of the closing track's seven-plus minutes, "Walked And Walked -سار و سار". The song, as gentle as it is unsettling, offers itself as a perfect sonic exegesis of an imaginary journey undertaken by the two artists as modern-day Dante and Virgil.

The reference to the Divine Comedy is anything but incidental. "Eternal Life No End" goes beyond an intriguing fusion of dark-folk, electronica and post-rock to become a destabilizing reflection on the moral and human crisis of our time. It's a sonic short-circuit in which spirituality is reduced to aseptic liturgy and tension coils in on itself until it implodes, leaving room for a desperate, final, muted cry for help.

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26/08/2026