Saudi Sounds

After reading this blog post about Gerv LV's recent crate digging trip to South Africa and listening to the excellent mix that accompanied it, I decided I wasn't doing enough to get a taste of the Saudi music scene. While I didn't exactly expect to discover a thriving underground dance movement ripe for export to the UK, I'd heard enough Omar Souleyman to know that the Arabs are no strangers to a drum machine. I went out on Monday morning, bought a cheap cassette player and a small stack of tapes. Results were varied.

I almost knew 'Arabic Techno' and 'Arabic Trance' were going to be mistakes as I was buying them, but I couldn't resist. I didn't notice until I got back to my room that they're both made by the same person, a man with some basic midi software and a simple mission: to put heavy string accompaniments and oud solos to the happy hardcore beats he's mistakenly identified as techno and trance. You can't judge a book by it's cover, but you can make an educated guess when the cover is a camel between a pair of headphones. I have only myself to blame for these mistaken purchases.

The solos proved to be a common stumbling block for much of the music I bought, not necessarily because they were excessively long (though they very often were) but because they always felt so similar in character, and so often seemed to demonstrate virtuosity at the expense of melody. This impression is very probably down to my inexperience with mid-eastern harmony, but nevertheless it prevented me from really enjoying 'The lovely voice of Nagat Al Saghira' and the tape whose only English word is 'music'. The same problem was in evidence for Mohammed Abdou, the chap shown top left and right here, but the tape on the right has some pretty snappy string arrangements and a 60s pop feel that make it a decent listen. I'm told Mohammed Abdou is an old Saudi favourite, so it was interesting to note that the stuff I thought sounded closest to western music was apparently the most successful.

The find I'm most pleased with, however, is 'Out of Phase. The Future Sound of Cairo'. Not Saudi but Egyptian, obviously, but there's a very high population of Egyptians here so I say it counts. It's not perfect, the problematic soloing persists even here, and the guitarist relies heavily on the dull reggae backbeat symptomatic of the most lazily thought-out 'world' music. At its best, it's a satisfyingly weird mix of electronic and organic elements; drum machines and tape loops create a rigid frame through which rogue hand drums clatter and break, while sci-fi synthesizers pull you out of the desert and onto a UFO just when you're least expecting it.

This track, Amphora, is easily the best on the album. At its heart is a wry little marimba hook that dances around deep, brooding bass stabs and frantic hand drums falling in and out of step; pressure from the percussion gradually mounts, stopping only to come back stronger than before. The bass becomes more and more smeared by distortion, and the rhythm section prowls through the dry ice landscape of a reverb'd-to-infinity violin melody and distant vocals, zapped-through by radiophonic synth lazers. In its final moments the pressure overcomes, and the machine comes to a halt with a helium screech and the last working cog spinning loosely out of time. Great stuff.

This isn't the end of my foraging for Saudi music, and hopefully I'll have enough by the end of my stay to throw together a little mix. I'll probably steer clear of the more traditional stuff, as I'm not sure it's ever going to get through to me, but if I can find any more egyptian synth experiments I'll be well pleased.