PRE-ORDER: Bilal Nasser "Every Martyr Is A Universe" LP (180g Vinyl)

The Constellation debut from Palestinian-Canadian guitarist, organiser, and harm-reduction worker Bilal Nasser draws upon his training in classical guitar and influences from punk, post-rock, and contemporary composition. Conceived during the student encampment movement protesting the Gaza genocide, Every Martyr Is A Universe emerges from the impossible question of art’s worth and meaning under such conditions, primarily recorded at Nasser's DIY space Uma Loft in Windsor, Ontario and enlisting nine musicians from this community to help render the album’s stately orchestrations, channeling a collective response of solidarity, resistance, and lament. Nasser’s previous two albums established a distinctive and accomplished acoustic guitar technique rooted in 20th classical, Robbie Basho, and various folkways, with a sensibility informed by shoegaze, ambient electronic, and indie rock. Every Martyr Is A Universe expands on this foundation as Nasser writes for a larger ensemble for the first time. While his acoustic guitar often still anchors this new work, the music is propelled by captivating string and horn arrangements, especially on the pair of longform post-rock meets post-classical pieces that comprise the album’s first half. The opening title track unfolds as an elegantly restrained suite for strings, horns, and guitar that conveys elegiac solemnity but refuses conspicuous dolefulness, its major-key theme expressing requiem as hopeful tribute and ongoing struggle, its counterpoint melodies weaving communion and resilience. The piece briefly gathers pace toward the middle of its eleven-minute arc, driven by Nasser’s thrumming guitar, a moment of urgency that evokes anxiety, ascendance, and defiance, that gives way to the album’s first discordant harmonic shifts and a thematic restatement of fragility, with haunting electroacoustic ambience closing the track in disquietude. This flows directly into “Erasure”, where we hear Nasser’s vaporous vocals for the first time, over a post-classical shoegaze intro that dovetails into a fleeting moment of ambient hardcore before the song’s central riff builds in durational repetition, various instruments alternately joining and adorning, ending in a final movement of ebulliently layered Minimalism and rockist drums for the album’s most overtly epic passage. Side Two is more rooted in Nasser’s prior solo practice: “And Where They Make A Desert They Call It Peace” juxtaposes foreboding drone-based sound design with an archival recording of legendary Palestinian author and militant Ghassan Kanafani, followed by “Who We Used To Be” and “Soul Of My Soul”, both featuring Nasser’s gorgeously delicate singing and assured songwriting, blending fingerpicked guitar with an ear for organically evolving arrangements full of harmonic and textural detail in an ebb and flow of strings, horns, piano and electronics. Every Martyr Is A Universe also sits powerfully within Constellation’s own history and horizons, in stylistic and political conversation with label artists like Thee Silver Mt. Zion, Do Make Say Think, Esmerine, and Black Ox Orkestar. Fans of those bands — and the combination of genreblending compositional avant-gardism and accessibility, punk-inflected assertiveness and authenticity, and heart-on-sleeve emotiveness they represent — will find a compelling and complementary voice in Bilal Nasser. Thanks for listening.