a difficult and narrow space

"Every one of us knows from experience that radical political activity contains as much impetus towards fragmentation as towards unity, and that when ‘people are united,’ despite the slogan, they still are regularly defeated."
- Don Hamerquist

“The magnitude of our failure is beyond our ability to know.”
- Sarah Aziza

Things cycle viciously: our desperate need to increase collective capacity matched only by our present lack of capacity to effectively do so; the urgency demanded by our current predicaments overpowering the slow, intentional, equally necessary work of building solid foundations for collective futures; our organizational disarray precluding the possibility of articulating a genuine strategic vision. We've always been prone to mistaking tactics for strategy, and we've always had a difficult time differentiating the content of our struggles from the forms through which those struggles are undertaken. And so on.

Of course I believe that truly incredible things can be accomplished at astonishing speeds and against impossible-seeming odds by even the tiniest agglomeration of dedicated people. In conditions of extreme social tension, sometimes all it takes is a little breeze to unleash a tsunami. But I also believe that the ultimate outcome of any acute moment of struggle will be largely determined by what kinds of resources each party has at its disposal at the outset. Our fields of action will always be constrained by decisions made long in advance of any particular moment of conflict: the organizational structures we build, the alliances we maintain, and the analyses we build collectively.

In the days following 7 October 2023, everyone I knew scrambled to make sense of what was happening in Gaza, and tried to conceive of how we might meet the horror we were witnessing with the kind of decisiveness and urgency it obviously demanded. The Palestine solidarity movement as we knew it – in this city and in this country, at least – felt to be in the same state as the broader Left: though of course some continuities remained, the network of radical activist collectives which had mobilized and educated so many of us during the first decades of this millennium seemed fragmented and dispersed. There was no lack of thoughtful and intelligent analysis of the situation in circulation, no lack of outraged comrades, galvanized and full of energy ready to be thrown into the fight, and a great many people indeed sprang into action, working very hard and very quickly to make things happen with truly inspiring results. But an organizational vacuum was apparent, and this lack of movement infrastructure had its consequences: less institutional memory, experience, skill-sharing; less rapport and trust among new comrades; and, most glaringly to me, less space for collective reflection and long-term strategic thinking.

Now, I think Salar Mohandesi was correct in his assessment that,

"The Palestine solidarity movement has shown that it is possible to have major internal disagreements while still prioritizing organizing, creating lasting networks that can be built on in the future, and launching durable campaigns that are relevant not just for solidarity work with Palestine but beyond."

But now, a little over a week into Operation Epic Fury, some of the cracks in this coalition are becoming fractures, and it seems we're once again scrambling to figure out a way forward. In the main, of course, I'm with Mohandesi in his central assertion that we ought to just shut up and organize – "The point is not that debates do not matter, but that they should be organized around meaningful goals, anchored to specific conjunctures, based in actual terrains of struggle, related to concrete organizing efforts on the ground, and oriented towards building power" – but what if we can't agree on what kind of power we're trying to build? What if we can't agree on who the real enemy is – or, indeed, if there's more than one to be faced at the same time? How can we even be sure of who "we" are, much less with whom we aim to act in solidarity?

In a sort of political-ideological survey of the contemporary Iranian diaspora published just days before the bombs started dropping on Tehran, Mehrdad Emami wrote,

“The unprecedented configuration of the Iranian diaspora in recent years has significantly undermined the prospects for internationalist solidarity with progressive forces connected to struggles inside Iran…On one side, monarchists and regime-change advocates function as open supporters of imperialist agendas; on the other, neo-campist leftists operate as discursive and media extensions of the Islamic Republic abroad. Between these poles, progressive diaspora actors are rendered politically invisible."

And as Iman Ganji and Baha Noorizadeh wrote in January,

"[T]he impossible impasse we find ourselves in today is the result of a dual abandonment. On the one hand, large sections of the Western left have abandoned Iran’s working classes and national minorities. On the other, much of the Iranian left has refused to engage seriously with the extended choreography of American imperialism, which continues to consume the Middle East through both soft and hard armaments—culture and bombs."

They continue:

"Attending equally to all these antagonisms–resisting the Pahlavist right and the state’s counterrevolutionary authoritarian project, while refusing imperialist solutions—leaves only a difficult and narrow space for any meaningful alternative. But in a situation where no viable leftist force yet exists, it is the only space available."

If our task, then, is to take up and expand that space, it's going to take more talking rather than less, more leaning in to conflict rather than avoiding it, more commitment to seeing the difference between being led by principle rather than by ego. As Nazanin Shahrokni beautifully writes,

“[Solidarity] is not grounded in identical analysis, synchronized outrage, or emotional unanimity—fantasies of political purity. Nor is it sentiment or slogan. Solidarity is a disciplined commitment to remain in relation under conditions that continually threaten relation itself. It requires sustaining engagement across disagreement, assuming responsibility for the effects of political speech, and resisting the pressures—emanating from both empire and authoritarian rule—that push actors toward isolation, certainty, and mutual abandonment. It is a political practice: the ongoing effort to think, speak, and act within a fractured world without allowing fracture to become the final condition of relation.”

Back in June of last year, as the so-called "Twelve-Day War" drew to a close, Dylan Saba reflected on the parallels between the feral violence being deployed against civilians in Palestine and the increasingly brazen authoritarianism being tested out upon those in the United States, musing ominously: “Only time will tell if the reversion to a politics of domination on both the international and domestic fronts represents the turbulence of a phase change between equilibria, or a lasting order in and of itself.” A little over six months later, prospects for the former are looking bleak indeed. What the next six will look like is going to depend on what we all decide to do now.

Okay, now here's some songs. It's a bit of an ambient/experimental grab bag this time around: some piano, some guitar, some saxophone, a lot of electronics.

It starts off with Spanish composer and cellist Yamila and "Visions II," an urgent crescendo of icy staccato electronics. Though her latest, Noor, was just released by Mexico City's amazing Umor Rex records, this is taken from her 2022 LP, Visions. Next it's "Alignment, Orbits," the lead single from At Source, the just-released collaboration between Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske – the former an Italian conjurer of shadowy, oscillating synthscapes (her Ecstatic Computation from 2019 was a favourite of mine); the latter a Norwegian master of extended-technique saxophone whose 2023 self-titled LP proposed the instrument as a fleshy extension of the human body (perhaps a less melodic and song-form oriented Colin Stetson, if you like). Then it's Radwan Ghazi Moumneh & Frédéric D. Oberland – of Jerusalem in My Heart and Oiseaux Tempête, respectively – who will release Eternal Life No End ليلة ظلماء ملعونة، كحياة طالبيها via Constellation in about a month. "A Silence With No Ceiling لا للصمت سقف" feels at once mournful and a bit spacey, gestural buzuk and saxophone lines twisting about one another atop a bed of droning synth.

Next, shifting into more technically exacting if no less meditative territory, it's Erik Hall, a Michigan-based pianist who over the last several years has made it his mission to reinterpret classic works of minimalist composition. Here it's a patient and serene take on Charlemagne Palestine's 1974 opus "Strumming Music," pared down to a brisk 15 minutes from its original hour-long run time on Hall's Solo Three, which released in late January (on the mix I've included about seven minutes). Then it's "For Loire," a watery and impressionistic paean to the Loire river from Iranian ambient composer and pianist Ava Rasti, followed by "dawn | pulse," from BODY SOUND, the forthcoming collaborative LP from Chicago-based experimental string players Whitney Johnson (viola), Lia Kohl (cello), and Macie Stewart (violin). The album promises to be a penetrating exploration of physical space via improvised vibrations of string and voice, and I'm truly beside myself in anticipation (it's out in a couple of weeks via International Anthem).

After that it's New York-based sound engineer and dark ambient composer Rafael Anton Irisarri, with "Signals from a Distant Afterglow," featuring vocals by Karen Vogt. It's drawn from Irisarri's latest, Points of Inaccessibility, which was released in February, and though perhaps expressing a slightly less gloomy tone than much of his other recent work, nonetheless remains just as quietly devastating. Next it's Georgian experimental composer Natalie Beridze, whose Street Life LP is a musique concrete tableau worked up almost entirely from samples of the late 2024 protests in Tbilisi – "Symbol Inside," included here, being the sole exception to this rule, in that it does include some choral vocal additions. This drifts into "Plumes," a gorgeous preview of more collaborative work to come from Big | Brave guitar hero Mat Ball and Amelia Baker, who creates austere and doom-laden folk as Cinder Well. The impressionistic and intuitive scrawl of Baker's violin here alights on the crunchy menace of Mat's brooding clouds of distortion, each casting the other in beautiful flashes of new light.

Finally, things close out with "Third Degraded Hymn," an Ian William Craig-produced remix of Winnipeg-based composer Matthew Pattison's Those Who Walk Away project. The original track was part of Those Who Walk Away's first LP, The Infected Mass, which came out on Constellation in 2017; the remix was released this week as a bonus track accompanying Afterlife Requiem, its follow up, and is a glorious filtering of the original's hushed, elegiac strings through Craig's hallmark gloss of static and tape warble.

• Mixcloud: a difficult and narrow space (march 2026)

• MP3s: 26/03 - a difficult and narrow space.zip

NB: The zip file linked above contains the individual MP3s as well as a single hour-long track of the whole mix.

While I've got you, allow me to point you in the direction of the latest issue of Musicworks magazine, where they let me write at some length about the incredible work of Quinton Barnes, and their brilliant 2025 LP Black Noise in particular. They even put it on the cover!

Okay, that's it! Thanks as always for reading and for listening, and thanks in partcular to DH for editorial support.

xo, graham