Minor Detail by Steev Hise

This is a recording of a live performance at Owl's Club in Tucson, Arizona, December 5, 2023, part of the Desert Drone series.

My set consists of improvised prepared guitar along with a pre-produced backing track. The backing track was made out of three different elements, all very slowed down: 1) the female vocals were Carla Chamoun singing a song called "Mawtini" which means "my homeland". The song was for many years the Palestinian unofficial national anthem. 2) The percussion sounds were slowed down and edited bits of a frame drum solo by Yshai Afterman. and 3) the other voice is a reading of an article in the Israeli paper Haaretz, about an incident in 1949 in which an Israeli army unit raped and killed a young Bedouin woman. The final section is the platoon officer describing what happened in his report, in which he said "I saw fit to remove her from the world." This story formed the basis of the recent novel "Minor Detail" by Adania Shibli, a Palestinian author. (Shibli was given an esteemed literary award for this novel, but after the October 7 Hamas attacks, the award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair was revoked, causing much controversy.)

These recorded elements are all slowed to a glacial pace to reflect my feeling, echoed by many, that as we all watch the genocide of the Gazans it's like viewing something in slow motion, like watching a train wreck or a 9/11 happen at 100th speed. It's being called the "2nd Nakba", Nakba meaning "catastrophe" - and it is a catastrophe, an apocalypse, that creeps along for months. As it moves on into its 4th month this genocide must be stopped, we must all continue speaking out against it and we must not tire and turn away.

Steev Hise is an artist, media activist, and parent based in Tucson, Arizona. He has presented his work on four continents beginning in the early 1990s.

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