Saru l-Qamar

Shivers. Another manifestation of electro-ambient-music from the Global South. I had to think of Naujawanan Baidar’s Khedmat Be Khalq, the collage of Afghan sounds that I reviewed recently. A Lily is a sobriquet of Phantom Limb’s label head, James Vella, who has been releasing a range of records by the likes of Loraine James, WaqWaq Kingdom, Ami Dang, Hekla and Richard Skelton. Vella is of Maltese origin. For decades it was common for families in the Maltese diaspora to send tapes with the latest news to relatives back home. They featured sung messages formatted as a type of traditional Maltese song, għana. Vella assembled such recordings into a haunting aural landscape. Malta is a small island, but the soundscapes evoke vast mountains and deep ravines. The island has always been at the crossroads of histories, coveted by all the cultures surrounding it, and it has absorbed much from all such cultures. Maltese language has borrowed a lot from Arabic and a lot of the language related to the album reveals Arabic roots. Qamar, in the album-title Saru l-Qamar (They Became the Moon) is Arabic for moon. The title of the lead single ‘Ħajti Kollha, Qalbi’ (My Whole Life, My Darling) is close to colloquial Arabic, and it wouldn’t be a surprise if għana was derived from the Arabic for song, ughniya.