MUSIC

Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点 Sababa 5 & Yurika 共有 ウィッシュリスト サポーター william rima thumbnail william rima I love the multiples influences on this track, it makes an amazing blending 特に好きな曲：Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点- (Ai no Kousaten) Yahseemi thumbnail Yahseemi I have heard this album so many times before I purchase it and still gets me excited! Both tracks are awesome! 特に好きな曲：Blue Universe - 蒼い世界 - (Aoi Sekai) James Endeacott thumbnail James Endeacott one my favourite singles of recent times - hats off to Batov - get them while they are hot... もっと見る... Guy Shechter (Neshima) thumbnail water bearer thumbnail solomusiko thumbnail isouyuosi thumbnail analog_worm thumbnail Visual Sequence thumbnail Paul Morrison thumbnail 040music-collector thumbnail Sudaksis thumbnail jonathan barnard thumbnail El Castor Feliz thumbnail DoitJAZZ! thumbnail destructor.gouv thumbnail Brad thumbnail 旧JOG thumbnail Biscuit thumbnail suntonglong thumbnail 8623k2o thumbnail Wyel thumbnail Robert Mulders thumbnail mogenstiss thumbnail LOKMAN thumbnail Cash:Caval thumbnail Scott Stafford thumbnail edhark thumbnail saloniko thumbnail LazerCat619 thumbnail Jörgen Sluiter thumbnail djbobojolais thumbnail maco-chin ★𝓭𝓸𝓬𝓱𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓫𝓸𝓾𝔂𝓪★ thumbnail BeastmasterXmas thumbnail Dr＊WAXX thumbnail t-dawg thumbnail Mobumfe thumbnail fergie thumbnail chyllo thumbnail nrik thumbnail Gheonoaia thumbnail Peter Mclennan thumbnail pastabrain thumbnail viktor_r_gruen thumbnail Al-Jive Mestizo thumbnail saint-pengo thumbnail vincenzoallotta thumbnail Zhanbolat thumbnail charlyvaninge thumbnail takuchi thumbnail jazzfischer thumbnail vegiq thumbnail Mulpasha thumbnail hamdam thumbnail neillwan thumbnail Lubey Lu thumbnail Stefan Schrom thumbnail lars.b thumbnail mushed thumbnail intellivision thumbnail jawwajj thumbnail Toast of Tsushima thumbnail Salsepareille thumbnail もっと見る... Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点- (Ai no Kousaten) 00:00 / 03:53 デジタルアルバム ストリーミング + ダウンロード Bandcamp アプリでの無制限ストリーミング、さらに MP3、FLAC、その他の高音質ダウンロードも可能です。 24ビット/44.1kHzでダウンロード可能。 デジタルアルバムを購入 £2.50 GBP またはそれ以上 ギフトとして贈る Limited Edition Transparent Green Vinyl レコード + デジタルアルバム package image package image Due to massive demand and ridiculous prices on Discogs, we are reprinting our 2nd edition of the Middle Eastern Grooves 7” Series as a Limited Edition Transparent Green Vinyl. Bandcamp アプリでの Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点 の無制限ストリーミング、そして MP3、FLAC、その他のファイル形式でのダウンロードが可能です。 24ビット/44.1kHzでダウンロード可能。 3日以内に発送予定 限定 500 残り: 5 レコードを購入 £11 GBP またはそれ以上 ギフトとして贈る Limited Edition 7" Vinyl レコード + デジタルアルバム package image package image Bandcamp アプリでの Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点 の無制限ストリーミング、そして MP3、FLAC、その他のファイル形式でのダウンロードが可能です。 24ビット/44.1kHzでダウンロード可能。 販売終了 Limited Test Press in Brown Paper Record Sleeves (Green Hand-Stamp) レコード + デジタルアルバム package image package image Bandcamp アプリでの Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点 の無制限ストリーミング、そして MP3、FLAC、その他のファイル形式でのダウンロードが可能です。 24ビット/44.1kHzでダウンロード可能。 販売終了 1. Crossroad Of Love - 愛の交差点- (Ai no Kousaten) 03:53 2. Blue Universe - 蒼い世界 - (Aoi Sekai) 04:26 アルバムについて Sababa 5 is the 2nd release on our Middle Eastern Grooves 7" series "This kaleidoscopic single from Sababa 5 pulls elements Thai pop, Turkish funk, and more, to stunning effect" Bandcamp (New and Notable) Featured on Bandcamp weekly: bandcamp.com?show=315 ********************************SABABA 5********************************** 'Sababa 5' was formed by a group of musicians known for their work for some of Tel Aviv's top artists/vocalists, such as Gili Yalo, Ester Rada and Liraz Charhi, as well as with famous groups like Hoodna Orchestra, Tigris and Kutiman Orchestra. With members' influences that range from wrecking crew recordings from the 60's, to analog Middle Eastern music from the 70's, the sound of the band constantly revolves around different genres and rhythms, yet, in its core, 'Sababa 5' is always a groove-centric band. Last year the band finished construction on their new recording space, a space that was especially built to accommodate live full-band recordings. Its location is right by the border of Jaffa and Tel Aviv, on Eilat St., hence the name Eilat Studios. 'Sababa 5' has just finished recording a new instrumental EP, with the aim to record more in the near future, in its new headquarters. ********************************YURIKA************************************* Born in a the Chiba district on the eastern outskirts of Tokyo, Yurika began her journey in discovering belly dancing at the age of five, taking lessons in jazz dance. After high-school she applied for belly dancing lessons almost by chance. Yet, as she quickly fell in love with the music and the nature of the movements, Yurika knew this is what she was meant to do. Soon after Yurika began traveling around the Middle East, learning bellydancing in different cities and countries like Egypt, Morocco and Turkey. There she met the famous Istanbul-New York based female darbuka player Raquy Danziger. who later took her to perform in Israel. There, Yurika began studying with Orly Portal, a master of contemporary folklore dance. After finishing studying with Orly, Yurika stayed in Tel Aviv and joined bands like Boom Pam and Ouzo Bazooka, and now, Sababa 5, where Yurika is featured as a vocalist, for the first time, in a double-sided 7" EP.

Jordanian producer Taymour teams up with Palestinian rapper/singer Bareetlblad on a killer mini-album of skewed gothic pop, like some auto-tuned, arabic-language re-imagining of Faith-era The Cure via Dean Blunt, Cocteau Twins x Future. Trust, it’s exceptional stuff, curving melancholy, PNL-style biomechanical rhymes around heartfelt new wave/post-punk loops, like little else.

'NOS INSAN (نص إنسان)' is such a potent fusion of ideas that you wonder why no one tried it sooner. Billed as a break-up record, it's dripping with intensity, finding fragile harmony between Future's slow-burning emo-rap milestone 'HNDRXX' and Martin Hannett's moody canon. If that sounds odd, just imagine a pulverised version of Dean Blunt's catalog: 'Black Metal'-era songwriting, Hype Williams-era beatmaking and Babyfather's plasticky rap commentary.

Haifa-based vocalist Bareetlblad is captivating on 'Sort Akrhek, Ad Ma Ba7ebek (صرت أكرهك ! قد ما بحبك)', singing and rapping over Taymour's beatless, chorus-heavy guitar loops. It's a flawless opener, isolating a mood that's potent and fully unique. There are no beats, just rain-soaked Vini Reilly-style shimmers over Bareetlblad's soaring AutoTuned vox. The album title means "half a man”, a reference to a hollowed-out stretch following a breakup, referencing vintage grunge and shoegaze while at the same time scraping life-or-death imagery from traditional Arabic poetry and the region's melancholy folk music.

Peep 'T2ddamet (تقدمت)', a track that pulls on the interplay between Taymour's '80s Cure-style drum machine splashes and Bareetlblad's melodramatic love-drunk rhymes, or the all-too-brief 'Bdounik (بدونك)', a minute and a half of washy industrial-cum-dreampop guitars over robotic, overdriven sweet nothings that sound as if they're being broadcast through an empty mall on a busted tannoy. Best of all, 'Msafreh (مسافرة)' rounds things out with a euphoric gust of strums and a half-heard vocal that you'd more likely expect to find on one of Cocteau Twins' late-period fantasies.

One of the best rap/R&B mutations we've heard in ages, a small, perfectly formed cult classic in the making.

Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic—essential vibes, infinite grooves, riffs that rippled across the horizon—seemed so direct and pure, anyway? What if, they had instead wondered, they went back to the barn where it all began and recut the record that had started it all, on the actual 10th anniversary of those sessions? They decided, at least, to try.

It did not take long for Laura Lee, Mark Speer, and DJ Johnson to know that the idea was indeed a good one, that in holding up a mirror shaped by the past 10 years to their formative set of songs they could feel and hear how they had changed as people and players. The result is The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, 10 entirely new renditions of the songs from Khruangbin’s oldest album, played and sequenced in a way that works for them now without being strictly allegiant to who they were then. Watchful eyes, for instance, will notice that “Bin Bin ii”, a bonus track back in 2015, has moved toward this album’s center. More importantly, attentive ears will hear how liberated Khruangbin sound from any expectations rendered by their own success, how this is once again the sound of three longtime friends deciding how this material might move in real time.

The barn is an essential piece of Khruangbin lore. In 2009, many years before Khruangbin’s early singles started to shape their course or even before they were really a band, they began to head to the barn, bought by Speer’s parents in the ’80s on a modest cattle farm midway between Houston and Austin. They’d been looking for a place to rehearse in Houston when Speer’s parents volunteered the spot and the small house next door—three bedrooms downstairs, dorm-style bunks above, a century-old stove in a small kitchen. The process was so consummately D.I.Y. that, when they convened there in January 2015 to make what would become The Universe Smiles Upon You, Speer and Lee rushed to remove a nest of bees by playing bass and smashing cymbals loudly before Johnson (famously not into bees, mind you) arrived. They made the record for $1,500.

This time around, Khruangbin decided to try a few functional updates. They finally ripped out the plywood dancefloor that had been installed for a wedding nearly two decades earlier but had since become something of a sanctuary for critters that would inevitably destroy any gear left behind. They rented a new floor, then bought silent new space heaters and boxes of hand warmers that they’d stuff into gloves during sessions. The first day was Central Texas paradise—T-shirts in January, the sun shining as they set up their instruments, ran cables, and even recorded the seven-minute version of “Two Fish and an Elephant” that appears here, the rhythm that Lee and Johnson built offering a welcoming group hug for Speer’s flickering lead. But then the cold set in, a cold so gripping that they stuffed bits of construction flotsam into every crack and crevice they could find inside the barn. They moved closer and closer as the four days progressed, as if trying to absorb one another’s radiant heat.

Perhaps, then, that’s why The Universe Smiles Upon You ii feels so warm, as if they were tending a fire simply by playing together. Early into “August Twelve ii,” Johnson watched an eastern meadowlark sing just outside the barn, its song picked up by the microphones. It wasn’t their favorite performance, but they knew it captured the magic of the time and place, the yellow beauty’s melody calling these six gorgeous minutes to order. They are likewise jubilant during this very extended take on “People Everywhere (Still Alive),” applying the lessons about pace, momentum, and dynamics they’ve learned during a decade on the road to start and sustain this dance party. It is an immaculate map of the moment.

Funnily enough, while on tour with this electric trio during the last several years, Speer became fascinated with early European instruments that could sound full without being loud—the viol de gamba, for instance, or the clavichord. He imported that enthusiasm into these sessions, not only often playing acoustic guitar alongside Lee’s hollow-body Höfner bass and Johnson’s brushed drums but also covering instruments in contact mics, so that they sounded close and real. You can hear that pursuit clearly on “White Gloves ii,” a song that has become such a Khruangbin staple they initially struggled with how to remake it here. When Johnson suggested it become “country disco,” though, the track suddenly unlocked. A rural-funk canter buttresses the bittersweet vocals and twilit guitars; the recording makes it feel as if you’re sitting in the center of the barn, head pressed between the bass amp and bass drum as Khruangbin drift away.

In many ways, The Universe Smiles Upon You ii represents the close of Khruangbin’s first chapter, the complete culmination of the music they made when they arrived at the barn in January 2015. During the last decade, they have reached an apotheosis of sorts, their love of Thai pop and heavy dub and American soul and Ethiopian haze perfectly crystallized in a string of splendid records and live shows that have hypnotized massive theaters and festival crowds alike. They’ve repeatedly sold out the United States’ most famous venues, from Red Rocks and Forest Hills to the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City, and they’ve crowned festivals from Glastonbury to Bonnaroo. Paul McCartney plucked them to reimagine one of his songs, while they’ve collaborated with Mali legend and band inspiration Vieux Farka Touré to honor his late father on 2022’s Ali. After more than a decade of relentless touring and recording, their expertly polyglot 2024 album, A LA SALA, helped earn a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Not bad for a band that recorded its debut in a barn of bees and mice for a grand or so.

So, then, what is next? The Universe Smiles Upon You ii provides a point of pause for Khruangbin, a chance to step back from a sound they now know so well and figure out where it may go from here. They talk about woodshedding, about spending a few hours every day with their instruments to see what new shapes they can make. Khruangbin’s splendid next run, then, begins where the first one did, too—in the barn, finding their way into the world through the songs of The Universe Smiles Upon You, second time even more absorbing than the first.

"Sametou Sawtan translates from the Arabic to “I Heard A Voice”. Spooky or spiritual, however one reads the phrase, it speaks to the ability of sound and language to cause pause, steal attention, and open us to the moment. Likewise, the music of SANAM blurs tender frenzies and fire-scorched ballads, collapsing free-flowing rock and jazz frameworks into deeply rooted Arabic tradition. To hear them in full flight is to be held in the present and reorientated towards an open horizon.

The record processes feelings of distance and dislocation. Whether in the yearning ballad “Goblin” or the slow-burning, autotune-doused freakout of “Habibon”, Sametou Sawtan captures the striving for stable ground in a world seldom capable of offering it. It rides the mesmerizing intensity of the SANAM live experience while affording their music nuance, depth, and tremendous dynamic range.

Like their debut, lyrics for many tracks are borrowed, words placed into new contexts to process the present. “Hamam” reinterprets an Egyptian folk song. In “Hadikat Al Ams”, the cracked hard-rock stomp propels text by contemporary Lebanese writer Paul Shaoul. And both “Sayl Damei” and the title track use poems by twelfth century Iranian poet and groundbreaking mathematician Omar Khayyam."

PRAED return to Discrepant, after their 2017’s entry Fabrication of Silver Dreams (CREP44).

Known for their signature blend of Egyptian Shaabi, free jazz and improvisation, the Lebanese duo behind PRAED - Raed Yassin and Paed Conca - now assemble a full orchestra for the second time taking the music to a deeper, rooted level.

Following their 2020 release Live in Sharjah, also under the PRAED Orchestra! moniker, the duo now revisit their unique blend of Arabic heritage and free jazz sensibilities with an album that keeps pushing further into strange and unexpected directions.

The Dictionary of Lost Meanings is just that, seven fully composed pieces and large-scale improvisations, performed by an expanded ensemble of musicians from across the globe. The result is dense and playful, unpredictable but familiar, a record where Arabic rhythms and microtonal melodies collide playfully against electronics, warped vocals and orchestral textures.

It’s less about genre than about memory — like tuning into a radio station broadcasting from somewhere between the past and the future.

PRAED continue to blur the line between popular culture and experimental music in ways that feel both grounded and completely their own.

Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic—essential vibes, infinite grooves, riffs that rippled across the horizon—seemed so direct and pure, anyway? What if, they had instead wondered, they went back to the barn where it all began and recut the record that had started it all, on the actual 10th anniversary of those sessions? They decided, at least, to try.

It did not take long for Laura Lee, Mark Speer, and DJ Johnson to know that the idea was indeed a good one, that in holding up a mirror shaped by the past 10 years to their formative set of songs they could feel and hear how they had changed as people and players. The result is The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, 10 entirely new renditions of the songs from Khruangbin’s oldest album, played and sequenced in a way that works for them now without being strictly allegiant to who they were then. Watchful eyes, for instance, will notice that “Bin Bin ii”, a bonus track back in 2015, has moved toward this album’s center. More importantly, attentive ears will hear how liberated Khruangbin sound from any expectations rendered by their own success, how this is once again the sound of three longtime friends deciding how this material might move in real time.

The barn is an essential piece of Khruangbin lore. In 2009, many years before Khruangbin’s early singles started to shape their course or even before they were really a band, they began to head to the barn, bought by Speer’s parents in the ’80s on a modest cattle farm midway between Houston and Austin. They’d been looking for a place to rehearse in Houston when Speer’s parents volunteered the spot and the small house next door—three bedrooms downstairs, dorm-style bunks above, a century-old stove in a small kitchen. The process was so consummately D.I.Y. that, when they convened there in January 2015 to make what would become The Universe Smiles Upon You, Speer and Lee rushed to remove a nest of bees by playing bass and smashing cymbals loudly before Johnson (famously not into bees, mind you) arrived. They made the record for $1,500.

This time around, Khruangbin decided to try a few functional updates. They finally ripped out the plywood dancefloor that had been installed for a wedding nearly two decades earlier but had since become something of a sanctuary for critters that would inevitably destroy any gear left behind. They rented a new floor, then bought silent new space heaters and boxes of hand warmers that they’d stuff into gloves during sessions. The first day was Central Texas paradise—T-shirts in January, the sun shining as they set up their instruments, ran cables, and even recorded the seven-minute version of “Two Fish and an Elephant” that appears here, the rhythm that Lee and Johnson built offering a welcoming group hug for Speer’s flickering lead. But then the cold set in, a cold so gripping that they stuffed bits of construction flotsam into every crack and crevice they could find inside the barn. They moved closer and closer as the four days progressed, as if trying to absorb one another’s radiant heat.

Perhaps, then, that’s why The Universe Smiles Upon You ii feels so warm, as if they were tending a fire simply by playing together. Early into “August Twelve ii,” Johnson watched an eastern meadowlark sing just outside the barn, its song picked up by the microphones. It wasn’t their favorite performance, but they knew it captured the magic of the time and place, the yellow beauty’s melody calling these six gorgeous minutes to order. They are likewise jubilant during this very extended take on “People Everywhere (Still Alive),” applying the lessons about pace, momentum, and dynamics they’ve learned during a decade on the road to start and sustain this dance party. It is an immaculate map of the moment.

Funnily enough, while on tour with this electric trio during the last several years, Speer became fascinated with early European instruments that could sound full without being loud—the viol de gamba, for instance, or the clavichord. He imported that enthusiasm into these sessions, not only often playing acoustic guitar alongside Lee’s hollow-body Höfner bass and Johnson’s brushed drums but also covering instruments in contact mics, so that they sounded close and real. You can hear that pursuit clearly on “White Gloves ii,” a song that has become such a Khruangbin staple they initially struggled with how to remake it here. When Johnson suggested it become “country disco,” though, the track suddenly unlocked. A rural-funk canter buttresses the bittersweet vocals and twilit guitars; the recording makes it feel as if you’re sitting in the center of the barn, head pressed between the bass amp and bass drum as Khruangbin drift away.

In many ways, The Universe Smiles Upon You ii represents the close of Khruangbin’s first chapter, the complete culmination of the music they made when they arrived at the barn in January 2015. During the last decade, they have reached an apotheosis of sorts, their love of Thai pop and heavy dub and American soul and Ethiopian haze perfectly crystallized in a string of splendid records and live shows that have hypnotized massive theaters and festival crowds alike. They’ve repeatedly sold out the United States’ most famous venues, from Red Rocks and Forest Hills to the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City, and they’ve crowned festivals from Glastonbury to Bonnaroo. Paul McCartney plucked them to reimagine one of his songs, while they’ve collaborated with Mali legend and band inspiration Vieux Farka Touré to honor his late father on 2022’s Ali. After more than a decade of relentless touring and recording, their expertly polyglot 2024 album, A LA SALA, helped earn a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Not bad for a band that recorded its debut in a barn of bees and mice for a grand or so.

So, then, what is next? The Universe Smiles Upon You ii provides a point of pause for Khruangbin, a chance to step back from a sound they now know so well and figure out where it may go from here. They talk about woodshedding, about spending a few hours every day with their instruments to see what new shapes they can make. Khruangbin’s splendid next run, then, begins where the first one did, too—in the barn, finding their way into the world through the songs of The Universe Smiles Upon You, second time even more absorbing than the first.

"Released by VDE/Gallo, a long-established label based near Lausanne, Switzerland, Anthologie musicale de la péninsule Arabique: Poésie chantée des bédouins; vol.1 is a field recording that documents the sung poetry traditions of Bedouins in the Arabian Peninsula. Recorded in Kuwait between 1970 and 1972, the album serves as a valuable resource for understanding the relationship between oral poetry and music in the region.

An outstanding treasure trove - some 20 years in-the-works - of vintage pop and chaabi bangers from Egypt and Lebanon via NYC cornershops and offies - aka Bodegas - and mobile phone shops, culled from tape and collated by Gary Sullivan ov WMFU and the blog Arabic Singles Going Steady, for DINTE Gary Sullivan gives the lowdown: “A series of random discoveries in the mid-1990s led me to abandon American and British pop and focus on non-English-language music, predominantly Arabic, for the next two decades. Feeding my ears required biking down to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, or hopping on the subway to Steinway Street in Queens, where I would pop into a handful of the local bodegas and immigrant-run cell-phone stores, some of which offered music from North Africa and the Middle East on cassettes and compact discs. When CDs spiralled into obsolescence in the mid-2010s, I reluctantly made the switch to vinyl, concentrating on 45s and intentionally filling holes not well represented in the digital era – more artists than not hadn’t made the transition from analog in the 1980s. This meant focusing on singles by a lot of artists I’d not heard of, and it quickly became evident just how much of the era – from approximately 1960 to 1974, when 7″ records were all but abandoned in Egypt and Lebanon – had been forgotten. What also became evident was the breadth of popular music issued by even hegemonic titan Sono Cairo. The consensus is that state radio and music publishing ignored traditional folk, shaabi, and other lowbrow pop in favor of the exalted art song we associate with Oum Kalthoum, Abdel Halim Hafez, and Farid al-Atrash. While this active neglect of the broadest Arabic pop spectrum is mostly true, I accumulated a not inconsequential number of what I can only describe as “novelty” records by mostly one- and two-hit wonders. From catchy gimmicks like the “doktor, ya habibi” of Maha’s “Doktor” and the “boom boom boom” of twins Thunai Badr’s “Love Raid,” to the Monty Python-level silliness of Sayed Mandoline’s fake Italian crooning and maniacal laughter in “I Present to You the Mandolin,” these were sounds I was genuinely surprised to hear.= Even more remarkable were the songs recorded in English: Karim Shukry’s celebratory “Ramadan” and Motyaba & Nada’s civil-rights plea “No Black No White” are two of my favorites, and thus included in the present collection. The tracks compiled here are often as beautiful as they are beguiling, but while the intention was to absolutely put together a solid listen, it was also my hope to slightly expand our understanding of Arabic music of this period beyond not just the usual suspects, but also subjects – and treatment of same.”

"Sametou Sawtan translates from the Arabic to “I Heard A Voice”. Spooky or spiritual, however one reads the phrase, it speaks to the ability of sound and language to cause pause, steal attention, and open us to the moment. Likewise, the music of SANAM blurs tender frenzies and fire-scorched ballads, collapsing free-flowing rock and jazz frameworks into deeply rooted Arabic tradition. To hear them in full flight is to be held in the present and reorientated towards an open horizon.

The record processes feelings of distance and dislocation. Whether in the yearning ballad “Goblin” or the slow-burning, autotune-doused freakout of “Habibon”, Sametou Sawtan captures the striving for stable ground in a world seldom capable of offering it. It rides the mesmerizing intensity of the SANAM live experience while affording their music nuance, depth, and tremendous dynamic range.

Like their debut, lyrics for many tracks are borrowed, words placed into new contexts to process the present. “Hamam” reinterprets an Egyptian folk song. In “Hadikat Al Ams”, the cracked hard-rock stomp propels text by contemporary Lebanese writer Paul Shaoul. And both “Sayl Damei” and the title track use poems by twelfth century Iranian poet and groundbreaking mathematician Omar Khayyam."

In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, environmental sounds were recorded in the dense forests of Kerala, India, and

in 2023, in the chaotic wastelands of Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan, where suicide bombings still occur, Peshawar,

where suicide bombings still occur in 2023.

This futuristic Asian music, created by blending traditional instruments with electronics and collage, mysteriously blends with Arab and African elements, evoking the scent of the earth despite being rooted in asphalt—a truly unique masterpiece!