Dawn Refuses to Rise was recorded, produced, and arranged on the home computers of Vance Galloway and Punk Planet editor Joel Schalit. It's being released in conjunction with a book of Schalit's essays, Jerusalem Calling: A Homeless Conscience in a Post-Modern World (watch for a review in Splendid shortly); you can buy the two at either the Incidental or Akashic websites. I haven't read the book yet, but Punk Planet is impressively smart, and so is this CD. While the less than pleasing graphics made me approach it with hesitation, there are few examples of experimental music this enjoyable to hear.

The samples alone make Dawn Refuses to Rise well worth getting. The Elders of Zion have compiled the sounds of daily revolution (Israeli kids fighting over toys and French Maoists quoting from Luc-Godard films), and placed them within music that's museum quality avant-garde. Vance Galloway's playing of guitars, kyma and bass never veers into the territory of the unlistenable, and seems to make genuine effort to adapt to the fascinating sources at hand. He speeds up his playing at tense moments, when kids begin counting backwards, and lets it play background during the sampled bit from Oedipus Rex. Whereas Jackie O. Motherfucker have always seemed to me like neoliberal nuts inspired by musicologists, not musicians, this is fancypants music done right.

You can listen to the Elders, with some surprise, as if they have no overt message. Even with the background sounds of anti-capitalist protesters getting a spanking, the music suggests that the Elders can overlook a history of horrors and turn night into morning. Some of the disc's best moments come when no samples are in use -- the danceable dub reggae of "Rubber Bullet Rock", for instance, and the avant-tribal hippity-hop spoof of "I Left My Heart in El Cerrito". While it's hard to listen to Dawn Refuses to Rise from start to finish without drifting off for a while to watch football, read an essay or write a manifesto, the Elders have made an enjoyably heady experience that aims for the heart, the hips and the head, then lingers like a protest sign (in glorious 3D) when it gets there.