We live in a world of solitary trauma and unrealized grief. We can sit alone with our phones and see it reduced to images in an algorithm. We can see our loved ones go through trauma in ways we can’t even understand or reach. In Palm of Hand, through extemporaneous collaboration between Snakeskin and Felisha Ledesma, Malmö and Beirut, there is a healing expression of all this agonizing, fragmented experience. The result can be deeply centering, a balm to play on loop.
For all the heavily worked, edited sound objects released — and yes, today is another Bandcamp Friday full of that overabundance — there’s something special about a release simply living as a record of a performance. It’s that feeling of a performance you wish you could hold on to forever.
So it makes sense that this is a live performance, jointly commissioned by two festivals deeply dedicated to live performance — Berut’s Irtijal and Malmö’s Intonal. The three artists each added their own layers of sound, each their own field recordings and memories, along with organ and synths. Snakeskin’s Julia Sabra (pictured) also lends her voice, and Felisha Ledesma works in her Max patch, which she calls AMQR.
All these deep-running emotions and turmoil form into a sublime, flowing continuum. It has the feeling of gazing out into the sea.
“I do not want to remember” ( “لا أريد الذاكرة أو النسيان” ) is the title of Samer Frangieh’s op-ed about the Beirut port blast, which ripped a hole in the center of the city six years ago this week.
In “Minor Detail,” Julia brings out words from 2024’s Natural History Museum, “in which she lists the items and body parts that Palestinians in Gaza have used to identify their loved ones who’ve been killed by Israeli bombardments.”(1) The aching layers of drones in this section make it sound like the earth and sky have opened into a yawning chasm. But there’s a fragile sensitivity to Julia Sabra’s vocal rendering of this text on top, as if collecting the pieces.
Out of this maelstrom of negligence and violence from its source reality, every moment of the performance manages to be caring, amidst the carelessness.
And so remember, we do.
What is the experience of a lamentation, of weeping, if not a form of relief — one that doesn’t numb us. If we become numb, then we’re truly lost — and we won’t do the things we need to do to stop these endless cycles of violence and demand justice. We need to listen and not tune out others’ trauma, even when that trauma may seem incomprehensible.
“How do you hold it all?”
The beauty of music, even in something as solitary as listening in your room or with headphones, is that you never grieve alone. The music is always there with you.
Palm of Hand debuted on Wednesday, featuring Snakeskin (Julia Sabra and Fadi Tabbal) and Felisha Ledesma in their performance in Sweden in 2025, with drums samples by Pascal Semerdjian. Mixed by Fadi Tabbal at Tunefork Studios, Beirut.
It’s out on Dania Shihab’s wonderful music label and publishing house out of Barcelona, Paralaxe Editions.
(1) From Shawn Reynaldo’s full text on this release, well worth reading.
