Bilal Nassar’s How Can We Say Nothing is a ruminative opus of post-rock soundscapes and classical guitar.
Bilal Nassar did not intend for How Can We Say Nothing to be a political statement on the genocide of Palestinians. On Nassar’s Instagram account, he states that the photo of his grandparents was chosen as the album cover last summer, prior to the initial clashes that catalyzed the current Israel–Hamas war.
As a consequence of the current conflict, I have been spending more time reading Edward Said, primarily his thoughts on the Israel-Palestine conflict, but also a variety of topics, including music:
In its instrumental form, music is a silent art; it does not speak the denotative language of words, and its mysteriousness is deepened by the fact that it appears to be saying something. (from Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History)
While listening to Nassar’s sophomore album, there is always the sense that Nassar is saying something. From the evocative, open-palm beseeching of the album title to the personal introspection Nassar weaves with fingerpicked virtuosity, there is a galvanizing spirit of resistance. To be sure, this is not a staid Mozart string quartet, though you could argue that How Can We Say Nothing is a classical album. Rather, Nassar rightly earns his self-chosen genre category of post-classical.
Post- is a notorious prefix that does little to define what it is and often only defines itself by what it is not: a departure without specifying what that departure means, a delineation of time that avoids defining the after. What Nassar does is place his genre clearly within the context of the original offenders (in music, at any rate); post-rock and post-punk be damned, it is time we come full circle and embrace post-classical.
Beginning with “On the Surface,” we hear the sound of a DIY skateboard wheel-turned noise machine hissing into focus. Recordings of Nassar’s family are juxtaposed with his airy vocals, only to evaporate over challenging guitar runs. It is a delightful amuse-bouche to an album that pays as much debt to Andrés Segovia as it does to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, cocooning the listener in meditative, sonic textures.
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Many tracks are instrumental, and overall, the lyrics are sparse and murky with reverb. This leaves the listener to focus on Nassar’s classical chops, which are always deft and expressive. Many of the pieces include motivic referentially, with instances of Nassar quoting Ravel’s “String Quartet in F major”, most noticeable in “Hireath” and “So That Flies Drop Dead Middair.” The effect is that songs blend and weave back into each other, rewarding repeat listening and close study.
But Nassar wants us to remember that he wants classical guitar and mosh pits to be good bedfellows. Droning synths and string instruments are purposefully contrasted with each other as if to say, “Here is before and after all at once”. The climax of the aforementioned “So That Flies Drop Dead Mid Air” is positively a triumph, with strings and soundscapes crescendoing alongside Nassar’s ever-expressive guitar. “Barely Here” leans more directly into the “rock” side of things, with Nassar allowing a more Phil Elverumesque delivery leading into an emo howl above flamenco guitar strums (has flamenco guitar strumming ever sounded this heavy?). It’s here that Nassar makes vocally explicit that sense of seething and confusion that’s veiled under the technique of the rest of the album.
On “Say Nothing,” Nassar sings the album title as a refrain, and my focus wanders back to the album cover photo and his social media post, where Nassar admits that the words “how can we say nothing” are not intended to be interpreted as “how can we say nothing about Palestine”. He notes the relevance, as his grandparents were survivors of the 1948 ethnic cleansing and lifelong refugees, and refers to the current genocide as a second Nakba.
In the same post, he continues to talk about the timing of the album and his sense of guilt at releasing music during this time: “I can’t escape a sense of guilt doing something as privileged as releasing music at all when my people undergo a genocide. I also feel like there has to be a meaning to the timing of releasing this album right now. I can only hope that on some level this project can offer solace and continue to foster advocacy for Palestinians.”
The struggle of pursuing art, which is so abstract and often an internal journey, removed from the external affairs of the world of geopolitics, is a relatable concern for any artist. However, going inward takes real strength and vision to look into the past and see new possibilities in the tools our forebears gave us. Nassar has given us music that inspires advocacy and reflection and challenges us to think of new ways of being.
In a talk with Salman Rushdie, Edward Said remarks upon the challenge of maintaining the Palestinian narrative in the face of the institutionalized narratives of the West:
There seems to be nothing sort of in the world that sustains the [Palestinian] story, that keeps it there, in other words unless you’re telling it, it’s going to drop and disappear… so it needs to be perpetually told in order to exist, whereas you feel that the other narratives are there and they’re kind of permanent… and they have an institutional existence.. and you just have to try and work away at them.
It is similarly a privilege of a critic to review an artist’s work while actual acts of violence and injustice are committed abroad. And yet the descendant of refugees telling his own story is still producing a product that sits squarely in the present, a present that is wracked by war, forging new lineages of trauma and exile, keeping the voices of his family alive. Works of art like Nassar’s are more critical now than ever when powerful new voices must be shared to contend with the forces that seek to forget the past and eliminate the future. How Can We Say Nothing has succeeded in saying so much to clarify what he is not and envision a yet-to-be-defined future.
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