Its an album release party – you listened to it – you love it – its time to party – the band is cooking for you – raising money, mutual aid for displaced Palestinians – door X$$$$ – food is donation based!
Durham, NC’s Palestinian-American post-punk band DUNUMS release I wasn’t that thought, their fourth full-length album, via Sleepy Cat Records. IWTT is a massive album, though not in duration, budget, or personnel. And though it’s enthusiastically loud and angular, its immensity is subtle. This album’s power is its evocation of scale, like a loved one’s iris mirroring Jupiter’s relentless storm in miniature. Featured recently on NPR Live Sessions, the album has already received enthusiastic praise from an array of tastemakers including V13, and The Daily Tar Heel with It’s Psychedelic Baby calling it “a deep dive into raw, emotional landscapes, shaped by personal and political turmoil.”
Led by self proclaimed “hot, sad, mad, glad diaspora dad” Sijal Nasralla (The Muslims), DUNUMS emerged in 2009 in direct response to events commonly known as “summer in Gaza” or “revolution in Syria.” Nasralla wrote nearly all the songs on IWTT from the perspective of his daughter. In his words, “Most of the album is from the perspective and voice of Tasneem — her wonder, earliest impressions of our world, her first hurts, her big messes, our traumas, and what life feels like when change is overwhelming. There are songs here on love – its projections and protections, the kind of love I have for myself, the way it is our magnet towards the world we all deserve and don’t have right now.”
In Arabic, “dunum” (dūnam) is an arbitrary unit of land measurement, approximately 1 Hectare, used in different ways to quantify space among villages in Palestine. A dunum can be the shrinking or exploding of space, a personal testament to the tremendous land loss, and/or the emotional/material transformation brought on by zionist settler-colonialism.
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