A Lily – Saru l-Qamar
After sharing ‘Ħajti Kollha, Qalbi’ last month, A Lily (Brighton-based musician James Vella) returns today with another cut from his upcoming new album Saru l-Qamar, out 5th April through his own label Phantom Limb and released in Malta under Kewn Records – setting archival Maltese home recordings to new music for a fascinating album of nostalgic quasi-ambience and cross-generational dialogue.
Beautifully spacey and blissful, ‘Kemm Nixtieq Li Qed’ translates in English to “how much I wish it were so”. Vella explains “While working with the tape recordings from Maltese emigres, this was a remarkably common sentiment – usually in the form of “kemm nixtieq li qiegħed Malta” – “how much I wish I was in Malta”. The phrase itself is imbued with sadness, but in this instance that sadness becomes so real, so tangible: in many cases (including my own family’s), those that left Malta in that period left in search of more stable political prospects that allowed them to live and work freely. Many were torn away from their home, their friends, their lives. I wanted to express this sadness in my arrangement of the recording, and I wanted to honour the experiences of the speaker on the tape. Not much of his recording has survived the decades since its taping, but even these snatches of audible dialogue reveal a deep lament. My arrangement – as with the rest of the album – is for hardware synthesis, focussing on gentle beatless rhythms that can tell a story in themselves, and a melody line that floats in a heavily reverberous space to reflect the ghostliness of the passage of time.”
This Project is supported by Arts Council Malta. ‘Saru l-Qamar’ will be available on limited coloured vinyl, digital and streaming platforms on 5th April. Pre-order from Bandcamp HERE.