Swedish electronica artist Civilistjävel! has radically re-shaped several songs from Mayssa Jallad’s haunting 2023 release, Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels. Reducing the original’s mix of contemporary techniques and traditional instrumentation to dub techno vapour. Where before the music moved between jazz, folk and the avant garde, sometimes hymn-like, sometimes near medieval, the remixes are dark and minimal and thoroughly modern. Reframing Jallad’s words and voice inside soundscapes whose roots lie in the pioneering sonics of Basic Channel. They are “version” in a 21st Century extension of the Jamaican `70s soundclash special sense of the word. 

Etel, Kharita becomes a beautiful, beatless mediation of low drones and spacious oscillations. A sad, ambient ballad, rinsed in reverb, and occasionally rocked by waves of sound, rising like whale song, the anger of leviathans from the deep. Holiday Inn (March 21 To 29) has choral, operatic backing accompany Jallad’s lead. Both threatened by distant drums that increase in frequency like approaching turbulent weather, thunder, or explosions. Mudun is remade as hypnotic, echoing ringing. Its B-line booming like a resting heartbeat. Seismic, yet suggestive of a dream state. A slumber shaken by external forces. Troubles raging in the world outside. Baynana, once Cocteau Twins-esque, is now stripped to strings mimicking an industrial hum, while its guitar is separated into sparse, isolated notes and dropped into delay, played as if from within a bottomless well. 

Holiday Inn (January To March) finds Jallad at her most Bjork-like, threatened by a growling LFO, and surrounded by programmed percussion. Bursts of it, like the automatic weaponry of the seemingly eternally civil-warring sides returning fire from the tops of Beirut’s hotels. It’s almost house, if far removed, though the only dance I can visualise is a slow, solo waltz. Kharita, however, has definitely been re-designed to move folks’ feet. Summoning sizeable energy, sort of subliminally, like an invisible entity, from a drama-inducing counterpoint of trebly clicks and a powerful bass pulse. Jallad’s stuttered, guttural exclamations punctuating what settles into a very Rhythm & Sound reminiscent groove. Panting, whispering, flickering as if possessed, as what passes for melody tolls like vast temple bell shadows. 

Civilistjävel! & Mayssa Jallad’s Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels (Versions) can be ordered directly from Six Of Swords.