SCREEN SIGNALS — WHEN THE SIGNAL CAME BACK THREE TIMES

Namasthay Album #62, Sadot, Narkis, Better Off Alone and a musical convergence across Israel, Jerusalem, Rebecq—and eight years of archives

Sometimes an album is finished.

Sometimes an album keeps happening after it has been released.

WATCH SCREEN SIGNALS → https://namasthay.bandcamp.com/album/screen-signals

SCREEN SIGNALS, the 62nd Namasthay album, appears increasingly to belong to the second category.

It began as an experiment in something I had not really attempted in this form before: a visual edition of Namasthay.

Not merely twelve pieces of music accompanied by artwork, but music travelling through screens—old recordings, new performances, visual reinterpretations, friends, artists, memories and encounters. Some pieces were new. Others were older signals receiving another visual life.

The album became the home of Ramener les enfants — freestyle, Bro Manifesto, Porcupine3, Pyramid Song, K-Otix, Hunter, and two particularly significant encounters with the repertoire of Israeli artist Narkis:

Ahavat Shalom.

And:

Sadot — Fields.

The idea behind Screen Signals gradually became larger than an album.

It became a Global Artist Initiative for Non-Submissive Peace: peace without erasing identity; dialogue without requiring submission; art as a place where apparently incompatible worlds can coexist.

And then reality started producing some very strange rhymes.

WATCH SCREEN SIGNALS → https://namasthay.bandcamp.com/album/screen-signals

SINGULARITY I — SADOT BECOMES A FIELD

Only days after Screen Signals, Narkis appeared prominently in Israel Hayom.

The accompanying feature carried the title:

שדות של נרקיסים — Sdot Shel Narkisim.

Literally:

Fields of Narcissi.

Fields.

Sadot.

The very word sitting at the centre of one of the Narkis pieces I had just reworked for Screen Signals had resurfaced around Narkis herself, now in a major Israeli newspaper.

Of course, that doesn’t establish a causal connection. Coincidences remain coincidences until evidence establishes something more.

But artistically?

It was irresistible.

Because the article itself explored something very close to what Screen Signals had been trying to hold together.

Narkis spoke about her multiple worlds: religious and secular, prayer and trance, motherhood and performer, solitude and relationship, fire and stability.

She described refusing to amputate one part of herself merely to make another part easier to explain.

That resonated profoundly with the premise behind Screen Signals: connection without self-erasure.

And Sadot—Fields—was suddenly staring back from the Israeli newsstand.

Then came the second signal.

WATCH SCREEN SIGNALS → https://namasthay.bandcamp.com/album/screen-signals

SINGULARITY II — BETTER OFF ALONE?

A friend from my Jerusalem orbit, Baptiste, posted a Reel.

The music stopped me immediately.

A remarkable vocal/beatbox interpretation of a dance record deeply embedded in European memory:

Alice Deejay — Better Off Alone.

I recorded it.

Partly because the performance was wonderful.

Partly because of its timing.

And partly because, following an interview so concerned with autonomy, relationships, boundaries and remaining oneself inside love, the title was impossible not to notice.

Except there is an important detail.

Better Off Alone isn’t actually an answer.

It is a question:

Do you think you’re better off alone?

I posted the occurrence.

And the story could perfectly well have ended there.

It didn’t.

WATCH SCREEN SIGNALS → https://namasthay.bandcamp.com/album/screen-signals

SINGULARITY III — REBECQ ANSWERS

Hours later.

Different country.

Different people.

Different context.

I am at a concert in my own town of Rebecq, Belgium.

Music, lights, people dancing.

And through the PA comes—

BETTER OFF ALONE.

Again.

The same musical object had travelled from my social-media environment into my immediate physical environment.

I filmed it.

And, half jokingly, I wrote:

“Expect 3? :0”

There was only one problem.

I didn’t yet know that number three had already happened.

Years earlier.

WATCH SCREEN SIGNALS → https://namasthay.bandcamp.com/album/screen-signals

THE THIRD SIGNAL WAS WAITING IN THE PAST

To understand this part, we have to travel backwards through the Namasthay catalogue.

Back to album #35 — HOMMAGE.

That project was conceived as an Israeli tribute album. I subsequently encountered repeated removal/moderation problems with it on SoundCloud, without receiving an explanation that satisfactorily resolved for me why the releases were being removed.

My response wasn’t silence.

It was album #36.

And I called it:

ROOSTED.

The tone was deliberately absurd.

If things were becoming unbearably serious, I would answer with humour, Israeli musical references, irreverence and an insistence on peace.

I wrote at the time that if we weren’t allowed to speak peace, perhaps we would simply have to sing it slightly off-key.

And buried inside Roosted is track five.

Its name?

ALICE DUO.

And there it was again.

Better Off Alone.

The same musical memory.

Alice.

Israel.

An old Namasthay album.

A contemporary Reel.

A Belgian concert.

Three different temporal layers collapsing onto one musical question.

And suddenly Alice had gone down the rabbit hole.

14:44 / 02:44

Then there were the timestamps.

14:44.

Later:

02:44.

I record these because they happened—not because I can tell you what they mean.

That distinction matters.

Perhaps this entire sequence is probability doing what probability occasionally does.

Perhaps algorithms and memory are excellent machines for generating apparent synchronicities.

Perhaps an artist who has produced 62 albums simply possesses enough archive for the past to rhyme surprisingly often with the present.

Or perhaps these moments deserve another name.

I don’t know.

And that uncertainty is precisely why they interest me.

Because Screen Signals isn’t about proving that every signal contains a message.

It is about what happens when we become attentive enough to notice signals at all.

THE QUESTION

Three occurrences.

Three environments.

Three moments in the Namasthay timeline.

And one wonderfully unresolved sentence:

DO YOU THINK YOU’RE BETTER OFF ALONE?

Maybe the answer isn’t alone.

Maybe it isn’t together either.

Maybe the question underneath Screen Signals has been this all along:

How can human beings connect without disappearing inside one another?

How can Israelis and Palestinians imagine peace without requiring self-erasure?

How can religious and secular identities inhabit the same human being?

How can friendship, love, art and disagreement coexist without possession?

How can two musicians hear one another without one claiming to speak for the other?

I don’t have those answers.

I have music.

And screens.

And sixty-two albums’ worth of signals.

SCREEN SIGNALS — Album #62

Namasthay - A Visual Edition / Global Artist Initiative for Non-Submissive Peace

WATCH SCREEN SIGNALS → https://namasthay.bandcamp.com/album/screen-signals

The album—and its music videos—is now on Bandcamp.

The third signal was already waiting in the past.

♾️