“I want to hit where it hits Israel the hardest. What I do doesn’t change anything. I can sing my lungs out and there will still be a genocide going on right now.”

Bint Mbareh’s words are not those of resignation though.

Born in Nablus, West Bank, Bint now lives in Catford, south-east London. Her architect mother was from a village called Beit Iba, near Nablus; her civil engineer father’s Palestinian family lived in Jordan. She grew up during a rare era when there was “a semblance of peace after the Oslo Accords,” before “all those veils were dropped.”

She studied music at the Edward Said National Conservatory with its slogan “Today an orchestra, tomorrow a state,” and in the Netherlands and Amman before she embraced Anthropology of Music at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, where she “focused on rain-summoning practices in the parts of Palestine I could reach.”

She performs with her Lebanese compadre Joe Namy. Namy is from Deir Mimas, in the olive groves of southern Lebanon, where Israeli drones and white phosphorus have savaged family farms: “Their survival is a testimony to resilience. Our olive trees connect us to our land. They are rooted, enduring, a symbol of belonging.”

As Namy drums with fingers, brushes and mallets, Mbareh strums her lute-like buzuq and sings with a walling timbre. It seemed like a sound-artistry of grieving.

As a sound researcher and singer Mbareh has said that she wants to produce “anonymised music. I wanted to avoid music as a category, so that it takes away ‘I am here and I am making the music’.”

What does she mean by that?

“When I talk about avoiding music as a category, I generally mean there’s a musical tradition now of people entertaining other people for money and that tends to overshadow every other type of sound in music-making, like music for health, music for togetherness, music to bring the rain and music as a warning of war. I want to belong to the latter categories rather than being an entertainer.

“The only option I’m confronted with is to be present with the genocide in Gaza. This happens because I’m usually curated as a result of being a Palestinian — sometimes in tokenising ways, and sometimes not. Our worlds are so tangled economically that it is quite difficult to avoid hypocrisy when I say I’m making music for Palestine.

“I’m still complicit in the suffering of my loved ones over there when I distribute through Spotify, when I play in venues funded by zionists or I buy certain items from complicit companies. I find myself searching for liberatory alternatives and potentials that the world can learn from in Palestinian tradition and culture.

“When I began making music a while ago, I was concerned with rain summoning as an alternative means of governing water bodies and sharing them amongst ourselves and our animal kin, in such ways that were challenging to hostile cultures. I think this project still lives, seeing water as a method and medium to sing with grief and memory, to point at the contradictions of trying to draw fascist borders around both the water bodies and the sounds of this world. Thinking through rain summoning helps me to demonstrate the advancement of a Palestinian culture, garnering complicity and collective decision-making technologies through song.

“In the performance you heard I play an interview with a martyred political prisoner, Walid Daqqa, to indicate that the dead can still use our living bodies as mediums for their echoes and voices. It turns all those present to people who are echoing, or being the physical mediums through which his voice moves, even after his death. We can be mediums for haunting, and the haunting is a necessary political decision when so many are being vengefully killed or silenced.

“In the interview, Daqqa talks about his closeness to the sea and that he wants to be reunited with the sea more than anything else. So I made recordings of the Mediterranean from Tunisia, and every time I play his voice, I play them together.

“Additionally my use of drone sounds is a choice to make Palestinian drones, to counter the constant, faceless, omnipresent drone warfare that Israel commits against Palestinians. I try to make drones out of human voices to give us our anonymity back for a few moments, but these drones, homemade by my Palestinian hands, are a good stand-in. I call them counterdrones. They may sound like suffering but in the expansion of suffering I try to infuse some defiance to constant settler surveillance, violence and colonialism.”

For more information see: bintmbareh.today