As some of you may know, Howl! Happening, an Arturo Vega Project was closed through the month of August. During this time our Gallery Director Ted Riederer traveled to Amman with his Never Records: Culture Not Conflict project. We are excited to share The Citadel At Sunset as we welcome Ted back to New York City!
The blog post that follows was first published on the Never Records website. Find more information about Never Records on Facebook.
The Citadel At Sunset
Written by Ted Riederer
Photos by Jason Wyche
I’ve been in this liminal state before, trapped between places, a fever dream of packing gear, goodbyes, plane flights, waking up out of phase. The sense memory of the adventure fades fast. I rush to take stock of: the feel of the sun on my skin from another hemisphere, the 200 trash strewn steps up to my apartment from King Hussein St., the glow at sunrise behind the Citadel, the tastes of a table covered with delicacies. The elsewhere routine of another life filled with new faces and new ideas recedes as I resume my New York life already in progress.
Just as the last light slips below the horizon of my memory, I remember that I still have the songs. I reach for a record entitled The Citadel at Sunset, and put it on the turntable in my studio. Suddenly I am transported to a hill in the center of the old city of Amman at dusk, 7:07pm to be exact, the time of the evening call to prayer.
Jason, Saeed, and I are standing beneath the Roman columns overlooking the seven hills that surround us. Countless neighborhoods with sandstone colored houses are carved into the hills like steps. Murmurations of dozens of flocks of domesticated pigeons are exercising in the temperate evening air. There is a slight breeze, enough to tickle the diaphragms of the microphones recording the moment.
Then in a slow swell, the call to prayer begins. It’s only one or two mosques to start with. The minarets of the mosques in Amman are accented with green neon. We count 18… no 23… no there are too many to count. The call to prayer grows in volume, delayed and out of synch, the echoes bounce in an infinite number of directions, and we are swept up in the moment, swept up in a thousand prayers. At the citadel, we are in the eye of this hurricane of sound. Listening to this recording 5,000 miles away, I am there. We are all there together, my friends, the city, anyone who hears this in the future.
There is a phrase in developmental psychology called the Mozart Effect. According to its proponents, listening to Mozart increases a child’s temporal-spatial development, that is, the ability to place objects in space and time.
I believe that recorded sound and music goes even farther, that beyond placing objects in space and time, the listener is transported in a form of time travel, dimensional travel(call it what you will).
Amman is at a crossroads in the midst of war. The cultural capitals of the region, Bagdad, Damascus, and Cairo, will never be what they once were. There are hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps along the borders of Iraq and Syria. With the influx of new cultures, new stories, new songs, can Amman be a new cultural capital of the Middle East?
Through Never Records we can travel to the heart of a country that is singing out in the heart of this turmoil. There are poems, love songs, prayers, rock and roll and hip-hop played on the duduk, the oud, electric guitar, violin and voice. If we listen we can hear the beauty of it all, we can be there at this fragile time in this fragile space.
