While the world acts like it is peparing for a clash of civilisations, Johannes De Bruycker and I fought our own clash of civilisations in Sydney while dancing wildly on this phenomenon of the northeastern region of Syria. His name is Omar Souleyman, a musician whom started recording wedding songs for other people in 94 and has now involved in the electronic music scene working together with names such as Four Tet and Caribou. He is still performing traditional Middle Eastern songs in Kurdish and Arabic but adds to it a twisted electronic music sound. It is difficult to put a label on him, and difficult to say wether his music is original or kitsh, but at least it is a new gentle breeze to the wonderful world of music This hilarious review sums it up quite correctly: Look at Omar in his sheer white body-length jellabiya and gingham keffiya, with his Arab hitman shades and AoE tache, looking like a flesh and blood version of Sheik Yerbouti’s Yahoo Avatar; Omar the hillbilly from Hicksville, Syria, who sings with a voice like a chainsaw and has taken old music and mashed it into a buzzing bleeping thumping mess. Or a raw zinging breeze of newness and honesty. Take your pick. Take sides. Listen to Omar and believe me, you won’t be sitting on the fence for long. Omar Souleyman is a magnet for controversy, for virgin wonder, loud guffaws, unwary bafflement and clandestine giggles, for the incredulous anger of cultural elites or the amazed delight of unsuspecting hipsters from Frisco to Frankfurt on the Oder. To the hip he’s an adorable techno-naif, a strange apparition from another world, an Arab trance-merchant with a spiky sound, whose music cruises and cavorts with grit, hedonism, impossible scales and vertiginous beats. For them, the very fact of his improbable existence is already half the charm. To certainculturati however, especially the nomenklatura of Syria’s cultural community and some more conservatively minded ‘world music’ folk in the west, Omar Souleyman smacks of gross cultural misappropriation, a kind of conspiracy of trash. I mean, is he and are his backers at the Sublime Frequencies label just taking the piss, demoniacally sucking the gullible into a great cross-cultural pop-art happening, like Syria’s answer to Malcolm McLaren or the KLF?
Posted on: Sat, 17 Jan 2015 04:51:48 +0000
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