Sound Inheritance

Starting with the still-astounding election of Donald Trump in 2016, the United States has been traveling on a treacherous path toward autocracy. From his professed admiration for leaders like Viktor Orbán to his total disregard for the rule of law, Trump turned the eyes of the world on deep flaws in our democracy and how our freedoms may be exploited in the name of a power-hungry ruler. Trying to overturn a presidential election by inciting riots was shocking, but not even his most lasting harmful legacy. By packing the court with hard-core conservatives who lied under oath when asked about their views and intentions, Trump has played a major role in disavowing the rights of women and minorities, turning back the clock on progress toward a more equitable country.

Now Benjamin Netanyahu is taking Israel down a similar path, moving ahead with a plan that would give more power to the prime minister to select his own judges, despite massive popular opposition to this change. As with Trump, this is a plan to change the legal system itself to enshrine his own views and those of other hard-liners. It also follows another disastrous and unpopular plan, which has been to dramatically expand Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and which may ultimately lead to annexing the area outright. In so doing, Netanyahu is trampling on the rights of the Palestinians who live there and jeopardizing the prospects for peaceful coexistence in the country.

What is a young Palestinian-American artist to make of these seismic changes? For electronic musician Omar Ahmad, raised in Brooklyn but with strong family ties to his ancestral home, the way forward is through the creation of open sonic space in which to explore possibilities.

At a recent show premiering his debut album, Inheritance (AKP Recordings), Ahmad integrated his personal story into a larger transnational one. The sound he creates is thick and lustrous, informed by his experience crafting electronic soundscapes that elegantly integrate African, Arab, and Latin influences. Voices of children and others, like his beloved grandmother, emerge occasionally, grounding the experience in a kind of hopefulness. The effect is emotionally involving as well as hypnotic; once you start listening, it’s hard to stop.

In his appearance at The Sultan Room, Ahmad spoke of how his music had been considered by some producers to be too ambient to be dance music, and too beat-driven to be truly ambient. But a sympathetic colleague suggested to him that this kind of integration is part of what makes his work distinctive. Drawing on influences like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Nicolas Jaar, Ahmad keeps the work fluid and surprising, with beats merging easily into the flow.

Ahmad has been a regular contributor to Laylit, a platform for emerging artists of the Arab diaspora, as well as a frequent performer at Elsewhere, National Sawdust, and other venues. He develops his sound so that his flow expands outward, and he supplements his electronic manipulations with deeply felt turns on guitar and percussion. He also regularly returns to quietude, giving his music an appealing warmth.

Ahmad told a lovely story of how the recording got its name, and led back to his own origin story. One of his tracks, “Gesso,” had the sounds of his sisters as young girls, explaining—in a videotape made for his grandmother on the West Bank—that he had been born. Her response was filled with sentimental joy, but specific purpose, too; she explained that all she had done to make a life for herself in this highly contested area was intended as the inheritance of her grandchildren, and generations beyond.

What is our true inheritance, both politically and artistically? I thought of that question on a visit to the superb Philip Guston retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. This is the show that, notoriously, was postponed in part to defray tensions arising from racial issues. (Never mind that his paintings were the furthest thing imaginable from an advertisement for the KKK.)

The current show lands with its expected power and unruly spirit intact. The sheer physicality of his oil paintings, with their painstaking catalogue of the corporeal, is overwhelming, the pink, fleshy paint suggesting a bodily transfiguration into art. I hadn’t realized the degree to which Guston’s art was informed by the politics of his time, going back to the 1930s. His first engagement then was outward, into the world, with plenty of strange and gnomic presence in its midst. The next was with abstraction, creating Masaccio-like form groupings through intuitively linked blocks of color. He pursued this path with some success until, suddenly, he threw it out the window.

Guston said, in an accompanying documentary by Michael Blackwood, that he wanted to bring more specificity to his art. That concept—the materiality of the world—leads to an exploration of the way certain forms work in an elemental fashion. The pointing finger, knobby knees, and anxious eyeball (with cigarette never far away) become signposts on a very personal exploration into his psyche and its irreducible elements.

The exhibition recalls the great wave of disdain Guston received for his 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery. Abstract art had many aspects of a high church at the time, a pious quality that Guston grew to resent. This first show of his signature later paintings was a huge shift, though in that same documentary he takes pains to point out that, to him, the abstract and the representational are all the same thing. And his colleagues were right in detecting his hostility, but it wasn’t towards them; it was part of the estrangement from his own art. In the end, it was his friend Willem de Kooning who encouraged his break with abstract orthodoxy, saying, with typical lopsided charm, “We don’t all have to play for the same baseball team.” He also observed something that could serve as a statement of purpose, for Guston and for all artists: “You know, Philip, what your real subject is? It’s freedom!” This freedom is our true inheritance and will tolerate no encroachment.