For some of us, everything is political. For others, not so much—and it seems like SUUNS singer-guitarist Ben Shemie is in the latter camp, at least when it comes to his band’s new collaboration with Jerusalem in My Heart, the nom de plume of Montreal producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh.

Two of SUUNS’ four musicians are Jewish, while Moumneh is a Lebanese-born Canadian whose previous band IRE courted controversy with its outspoken anti-Zionist agenda. But when it came time to record SUUNS + Jerusalem in My Heart, it was apparently all about the music.

“There’s no political content,” Shemie stresses, on the line from a Dallas, Texas, recording studio. “I mean, I know that Radwan’s project has political undertones to it, but we really went into this looking at the music side. Although it is kind of cool that it’s a nice mix of personalities from different parts of the world coming together—and maybe there is something in there that I’m not getting—we’ve never talked about that. The way I describe the project is just that it’s a project between friends—people who have mutual respect for each other’s projects and who like what each other do. But it was never a political conversation.”

The five musicians know each other from Montreal’s active underground scene; Moumneh’s also done live sound for SUUNS on several European tours. “It felt like a natural fit to make music together,” Shemie says. “It wasn’t that we had the intention of making a record, but we’d booked off some time where we thought ‘Okay, let’s try to do something together.’ So we played together, and it felt really good. And from there it kind of developed really organically, in the sense that we never really tried to push it too hard. We really tried to let it happen when it was available to happen—and, for me, that’s why it feels really good. It really feels like dudes playing together without any expectations of the music.”

SUUNS + Jerusalem in My Heart offers a hypnotic fusion of fuzzed-up space rock, Middle Eastern folk music, and dance-floor rhythms, with Moumneh taking the lead on its most accessible tracks, many of which find the producer singing in Arabic.

“He’ll bring in a melody for a song which is in Arabic, and the lyrics are usually a traditional poem, and we’ll kind of work around it,” Shemie explains. “We’ve definitely learned a lot by doing this, by incorporating that kind of style. Max [bassist and keyboardist Max Henry] has gotten deep into quarter-tone synthesizer stuff, so we’re all just trying to feel it as it goes along—although it’s not harmonically very complicated music, which I think suits us as a band.

“And,” he adds, “it’s really enjoyable to play.”

SUUNS and Jerusalem in My Heart play a Vancouver International Jazz Festival show at Fortune Sound Club on June 23.