Jean-Marie Benjamin

condition (record/cover): NM / VG (writing on back cover) Jean-Marie Benjamin irrupts into the catalog with Jérusalem Symphonie on Studio SM, a work carrying the weight of history in its title alone. Jerusalem as musical subject means confronting millennia of stratification: city three times holy, three times contested, palimpsest of overlapping prayers.

Benjamin doesn't attempt impossible synthesis but rather juxtaposition: fragments of different traditions brush against each other without merging, like the communities inhabiting the actual city. The symphony becomes acoustic mapping of a space that no cartography exhausts. The ambition is enormous, the risk of failure proportional. Studio SM, a label associated with sacred music, provides appropriate home for a work that treats the holy city as sonic phenomenon rather than political football.