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21 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

Analog Africa has unveiled another lovingly assembled and lavishly packaged overview of funky lost recordings from the birthplace of voodoo. Tireless German vinyl-monger Samy Ben Redjeb has already tackled Benin once (with last year’s excellent Orchestre Poly-Rythmo compilation), but Legends of Benin aims for a somewhat broader survey. This compilation is devoted to four legendary composers from that country's strikingly fertile period of 1969-1981: Gnossos Pedro, Antoine Dougbé, El Rego et Ses Commandos, and Honoré Avolonto.

Analog Africa

Among the four composers compiled here, Honoré Avolonto is likely the most prolific and commercially successful. Consequently, he had the good fortune of being backed by some the more amazing and influential bands in Africa (such as the aforementioned Orchestre Poly-Rythmo and Ignace de Souza’s Black Santiago, both of which make appearances). All three of his tracks here are excellent, but the infectious Afrobeat of “Tin Lin Non” is probably the best (although the instrumental breaks in “Dou Dagbé Wé” are pretty damn sizzling too).

Conversely, the least known of the composers represented is Antoine Dougbé and this compilation inadvertently provides ample evidence to justify his marginalization. While he is the inventor of Afro cavacha (a hybrid of Latin music, Congolese rumba, and Beninese voodoo percussion) and apparently a record-collector favorite, most of his tracks are relentlessly cheery and poppy. Oddly, however, his reggae-influenced “Nou Akueunon Hwlin Me Sin Koussio” is one of the album’s clear highlights due to its wild and ambitious percussion fluorishes (although the chorus sounds disconcertingly like The Animals’ “House of The Rising Sun”). As an aside, Dougbé is an excellent example of an unusual quirk displayed on this compilation: none of the four featured artists adhere too closely to one style. Consequently, I was occasionally surprised by great tracks by artists I thought I could write off (and less frequently, vice-versa).

El Rego et Ses Commandos are famously responsible for being the first Beninese band to incorporate American soul and funk into their sound. While their “Feeling You Got” and “Vimado Wingnan” are two of the more influential and sought-after tracks in Benin’s history, their sound is quite Westernized (James Brown’s shadow looms particularly large here). That said, it is easy to see why they had such an impact, as they display an enormous amount of energy and exuberance. Despite that, I vastly prefer their understated bossa nova-tinged “E Nan Mian Nuku” to the rest of the tracks presented. I'm probably no fun at parties.

The last of the four featured composers is Gnossas Pedro, who is best known for popularizing modern agbadja, which is an inspired mutation of a three-piece percussion rhythm traditionally used in burial ceremonies. Redjeb has included Pedro’s first ever agbadja recording—the opening “Dadje o Von O Von Non” from 1966—but it is more of a historical curiosity than a great track: the rhythm is certainly propulsive, but the vocals are a bit on the sing-song side and the whole thing feels more like a vamp than an actual song. Thankfully, Pedro later makes up for it by contributing two the best tracks on the album: the laid-back funk groove of “Okpo Videa Bassouo” (which features some killer smoky sax hooks and an insanely tight and virtuousic rhythm section), and the sultry closer “La Musica en Verité” (which absolutely decimates the rest of the album).

As with everything released by Analog Africa, Legends of Benin is generally quite exceptional. Of course, it doesn’t quite have the success rate of African Scream Contest, but several of the weaker tracks have historical importance, so Redjeb’s decision to include them makes sense (sometimes musicology and funkiness are lamentably at odds with one another). Perhaps Redjeb is reaching the bottom of Benin’s treasure trove of forgotten funk vinyl, but the rare photos, biographical information, and handful of brilliant tracks should make Legends extremely difficult to resist.

samples:

Gnossas Pedro and His Dadjes Band – "La Musica en Verité"
Honoré Avolonto and Orchestre Poly-Rythmo – "Tin Lin Non"
El Rego et Ses Commandos – "E Nan Mian Nuku"

21 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

A lost gem of private '60s psychedelia, Dave Bixby's debut solo effort is a lonely affair to be sure. With only acoustic guitar in hand, the songwriter penned this album in about a month in reaction to a year of drug abuse. Having filled his head with plenty of acid, the songs here serve as an intimate portrait of an unhinged victim of counterculture.

Guerssen

"Drug Song" fittingly opens the record, serving as a lament for the mind Bixby believes himself to have lost. With instantly memorable lyrical and melodic content, the spare production here fits seamlessly in with the overall feel of the record. This is downer-folk at its best, as Bixby croons a lyric of loss: "Along in the garden/I've lost my mind." It's eerie and off-putting enough that no one would second guess it.

The strength of the album is its ability to immerse the audience in the dark mood that Bixby surely was undergoing at the time. Painfully honest and relentlessly sad, it remains as alluring as watching a building get smashed to the ground; there is, of course, beauty in destruction.

Each track is at once gentle and raw, subtle and apparent. "Mother" is an apology letter to Bixby's mother, whose attempts to help him find God proved fruitless until, of course, Bixby had undergone the proper mental agonies to seek it out himself. It is a regretful offering that seems steeped in personal meaning for the singer. The hollow vocal production only makes it that much more touching. "Open Doors" opens with extended guitar work weaving shades of grey before slipping into a dark folk ballad whose true effect is buried far beneath the lyrics themselves while "666" is, suprrisingly, the most upbeat number here, though that's a highly relative statement.

Rumor has it that Bixby was a member of a cult called "The Movement," and that this album was essentially put together for it. With as deep a history as this, it is no surprise that originals often go for over $2000, making it a private press legend among collectors of Xian folk. Finally properly reissued and available to the masses again, the album has never sounded better and, grim though it may be, this is strong material and one of the finest examples of its style. It is easily about as lonely and haunting as they come.

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21 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

Every word, rhythm, and melody that seeps from David Longstreth's brain reeks of insincerity and pompousness. The most recent fruit of his ego, Bitte Orca, has come to be pornography for writers and aimless hipsters hungry for something "eccentric" and "unusual" over which they may pant. In truth, it's a dull and transparent mish-mash of pop styles seasoned with empty gestures and overwrought arrangements.

Domino

That self-important musicians are writing and performing angular pop because it's experimental, man doesn't surprise me. People without ideas or genuine motives are constantly creating all kinds of art and entertainment for all kinds of reasons, but most of them don't become self-righteous monstrosities and generate critical behemoths like Bitte Orca. Praised for its ostensibly experimental character and thoughtful arrangements, in actuality the Dirty Projectors' latest is little more than a masturbatory device for a faux-intellectual lead man with delusions of grandeur. He's a shameless and distasteful self-promoter carrying an air of superiority around on his back like a cross made from iron.

That fact wouldn't matter so much if it didn't come out in the music the way it does. Plenty of smug jerks have written perfectly good music with a few words from James Joyce, William Blake, or some other iconic artist swimming around in their head. But, the Dirty Projectors sound like a band forcing themselves through odd meters and off-kilter harmonies. The music wants to spread its wings and fly, but the band has tied a ten-ton stone of musical bravado to their performances for no other reason than that they're capable of doing so. In addition, Longstreth can't sing to save his life and when any of the three female members take the lead vocal role they put on a cute and vacant quality that is more repulsive than attractive. One must assume from reports that this is all Longstreth's doing. He desires nothing more than to make his meticulously designed arrangements sound like spontaneous and joyful music, but like the singing the music is an empty shell of styles compressed and slapped together for the pleasure of compressing and slapping things together. There's nothing inherently wrong with this and such playfulness has likely spawned plenty of great ideas, songs, and albums, but over its 40 minutes Bitte Orca travels nowhere and develops little more than a sugar-rich stomach ache. Throughout the record over-the-top four-part vocal harmonies clash with haphazard string arrangements, a semi-irregular, half-danceable rhythm section, and dynamic shifts that might surprise someone unfamiliar with Slint. On the surface it's all very surprising and unique, but with time it sinks in and becomes all too familiar. I've heard this sort of thing from more competent bands. None of them are particularly obscure and many of them were exploring disparate musical styles before Longstreth was even born, which makes all the talk of inventiveness associated with this record even more null and void.

Of all the songs, only "Two Doves" exhibits the restraint necessary to blend pop music with big ideas. Though it pretends a kind of baroque or classical influence, it's a pleasant song in which Longstreth's predisposition for highbrow indulgence is succumbed by a sweet melody and a hint of genuine emotion. No amount of planning, scripting, rehearsing, or reading can possibly be a substitute for that one important ingredient: honesty. A little mental instability might not hurt, but Longstreth could only hope to be as insane as his heroes. Pretending a reclusive and unstable mental disposition may be his next move, though. I can see it, now: the New York Times reports that Longstreth has surrounded his musical equipment with relics from the Nietzsche estate and plans on releasing a pop opus titled Glory to God and His Unwilling Participants. Wouldn't that be wacky, fun, and smart?

I'll apologize if this happens because it wouldn't surprise me if Longstreth attempted it.

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21 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

Too often overshadowed by the shrine that is Nuggets, this compilation, along with its companion Testament volume, has nevertheless earned significant cult status among garage aficianados, and rightly so. Comprising a plethora of rare singles from the era, the album is a near necessity for those even tangentially interested in this material.

Past & Present

Perhaps not as vast as Nuggets, this compiation's 31 tracks are nothing to scoff at, and the focused attention means that the material here is even more consistent than that found on its famous sibling. Whereas Testament focuses on the softer side however, Epitaph has a rawer, punkier feel right from the start. Opening with The Rogues' "The Train Kept A-Rollin'," a blues stomper right out of The Sonics aesthetic, the album never slows, quickly following with The Shag's "Stop and Listen," a deranged and jangly psychedelic ode to LSD: "Everybody's goin'/Everybody's trippin'/Everybody tells you what you been missin'" they sneer.

This is about where the album resides throughout of course, with shining moments found throughout. Larry & The Blue Notes' "Night of the Sadist" depicts an attempted love-making session squandered by an unexpected guest, "the sadist." (It's not exactly radio friendly material.) An odd counterpoint can be found in The Electric Prunes, perhaps the best known group here, and their "Vox Wah Wah Ad," which is exactly what it says it is. Claiming that the sound of "the now" is available with it, the ad even points out the sitar sound that can be achieved with it, a trait ably proven by the Prunes themselves.

With this broad a range of material it is difficult to point out highlights, though The Regiment's "My Soap Won't Float," featuring a melody out of Arthur Lee's book, grooves atop a psychedelic Doors-y organ riff. The Alarm Clocks may have the strongest single here with "No Reason to Complain," a surprisingly forward-looking folk groove that directly points toward The Velvet Underground's sound. It is one the rarest and strongest singles from the era, worth the price of admission alone.

Any difficulty found in pointing out highlights is only cause for greater celebration here. Each track fits nicely into the desired sound, veering between the rawest piece here, Randy Alvey & the Green Fuz's "Green Fuz"—whose mud-buried backing is met with vocals declaring that "we're here"—and the sweet psychedelic lines of Beaux Jens' "She Was Mine." Far more than a time capsule, this material points the way for nearly every interesting piece of rock that came after, if not in sound than certainly in attitude.

samples:

The Alarm Clocks - No Reason to Complain
Wilde Knights - Beaver Patrol
The Regiment - My Soap Won't Float

21 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

A reissue of one of the earlier releases on the Intransitive label, this masterwork has loss none of its dark luster in the past decade. It is a dark trip up river into a heart of darkness, with Marchetti as the local shaman and guide, alongside a broken radio that picks up random frequencies across the world and sacred magnetic tapes, presenting music across the world as a form of cultural transcendence.

Intransitive

Marchetti has discussed previously that he has always been fascinated with the concept of the medicine man, and here that is carrying over from not just concept but into execution. The six tracks that make up this album are separated by brief segments of silence, keeping each piece as a separate journey, though linked thematically and structurally by a similar approach to the recordings. The opening piece "Un" begins with slapping percussion, acoustic guitar, and loops of African vocals, which are musical yet have a disconnected, vaguely sinister color to them. The vocals dominate the piece, continuing throughout its duration, sometimes augmented by other spoken voices from a megaphone off in the distance, and eventually the voice is processed and layered upon itself, cut up beyond recognition like the transition from ceremony into spiritual intervention. All the while, subtle feedback and swells of noise slither in like sounds from beyond, never drawing attention to themselves, but never going away.

On "Trois" the journey continues with more cut up vocals, but noisy field recordings, powerline hums, overamplified radio transmissions and fragments of music from across the world appear. Enshrouding all of this is a constant sense of movement and action, heavy breathing from an unseen entity. The fragments of pop music fade at the end, leaving only isolated voices that transition from spoken words into screams and animalistic growls, an exorcism that finally ends with just the sounds of nature: birds and crickets.

"Cinq" and "Sept" are further documentations of Marchetti’s sonic healing and ritual, the former has more "traditional" high frequency waves of tape music to go with the birds and other natural sounds, as voice enters both that and the electronic sounds become darker and more sinister. Spoken word elements appear, though through various filters and cut up elements, ending with crackling percussion and voices. "Sept" emphasizes the cut and paste elements of voice, cut apart into hysterical shrieks and barks, the sound of demon being exorcized from tribesmen.

"Neuf" is one of the few somewhat lighter pieces, though it is an extreme stretch of the adjective. The mix here is somewhat more arid, at least until the second segment where slow musical elements are violently cut with vocal blasts and screams. The last full piece, "Onze," is the expected climactic closing. Opening with disembodied voices and babies crying, jaw harp notes sharply contrast the tribal shrieks and cut up voices that are much more terrifying. Throughout it stays tense and dark, the tribal screams overshadowing the surrounding music before ending with just the sound of a radio in the distance, playing a pop music from multiple continents simultaneously.

I’m very glad that Intransitive saw fit to reissue this disc, because not only is it an extremely powerful, narrative work, but it also nicely compliments the collaboration with Seijiro Murayama that the label released recently. Although the material dates back between 1993 and 1995, it retains a dark majesty that transcends time and the physical realm into a dark mysticism that can only appear by the conjuring of Shaman Marchetti.

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21 June 2009

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Culled from a slew of self-released lathe cut LPs and CD-Rs, the first pressing of this disc far outnumbers the sum total of the original material here, the largest of which was an acetate LP of 27 copies. To call this compilation bizarre does a disservice to the word, but the personal world documented on cassette from this husband and wife duo fit in perfectly with the absurdist likes of Sudden Infant or the Schimpfluch-Commune community and deserves a wider outlet than just the personal, handmade releases.

Intransitive

The disc is split between four tracks by the Kommissar, and three from Mama Bar. Their work follows a similar strange road, so they never sound completely independent from each other, but both have their own styles and approaches. The core concept on most of these tracks are simply using the mundane things everyone experiences as source material for deranged sonics. The opening "HJCVGrimmelshausen" is pure spoken word, though the unnatural breathing strategies and cut-up approach are anything but a narrative in the traditional sense.

"Meine erste Zeitmachine" is similar, though here it is a narrative piece of fiction by Hjuler describing how the world we know today is the result of him traveling through time, all of which is recorded in the basement of an old police building, which oozes with its own environmental sounds and cues. "de nye Rigspolitichenfen" is another cut-up, this time with the Kommissar reading an article discussing Danish policing reforms. Conceptually the most "out there" Dadaist piece is "Lauf in Eine Herde," which is a field recording of running into a herd of cows while wearing a red shirt. The cows were frightened and ran off, leaving only breathing and sparse nature sounds. It is a field recording that, like the actual act, nothing happens in, which is what makes it so great.

Mama Bar’s pieces also hinge heavily on the use of her voice, though in a less abrupt and jarring manner. "Lichtblicke" is all tape-stretched voices, what sounds to be a looped car alarm in the distance, and the occasional bit of singing (which could be coming from a nearby shower). The long "Ehrfurcht" glides on layered female voices, some gentle and singing, others more absurd and silly. The singing continues throughout, eventually contrasting the rattling and clattering sounds so often heard on various electro-acoustic works, becoming more complex and varied as the track continues its 25 minute duration. The source of this material? A tape recording of Mama Bar taking the duo’s son for a bike ride, along with a tape recorder for good measure.

The most fascinating part of this compilation is definitely the way it was constructed. There are many complex tape collages and MFA theses out there based on the lengthy study of Pierre Henry or Iannis Xenakis that come out sounding like the suburban banalities that are documented here. But rather than a 30 page score or long winded manifesto of the symbolic meaning behind the music, here it is simply a duo who is having fun with tapes. It’s intensely cliché to say, but it does demonstrate the limitless potential for sound that is around one’s life at any given time, and the reasons why it should not be ignored.

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20 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

The latest release from Berlin-based sound designer and producer Ben Lukas Boysen is an ambitious two disc opus. On the first disc, he once again works with precision more than melody and space more than structure but on the second disc, his remixers take Hecq's original in a dozen different directions.

Hymen

I like Hecq's music and find it interesting but I have a hard time connecting to it emotionally. In some way, that may be part of the point. Hecq is detailed and precise in the way that he puts sounds together, but his approach creates some distance from any emotional core. He's a bit like a master draftsman who can render a beautifully complex drawing of a building that elicits awe or even careful reflection, but a perfect drawing can often be more detached than something rougher and more impressionistic. Sometimes I want a quick scribble that tells me how the artist feels about the building, but that's not much of a part of Hecq's work.

Steeltounged is another fine example of digital drums and atonal drones poking out of the darkness to create tension. That tension is rarely resolved, so the album overall feels a bit uneasy. Part of me wants to say "get to the point," but then when I listen to the album as a whole, I realize that the point may well be this vague discomfort. Nowhere is this notion better supported than in the track "I Will Survive," featuring Nongenetic from Shadow Huntaz. From what I can hear of the vocal, Non has delivered a strong anthem about creative persistence in a music industry riddled with sameness, but the vocal is so abused, tweaked, scattered, and removed from its natural habitat of a hip hop track that it feels like a struggle. It's as if Hecq has found the disembodied voice from a hip hop record and he has dissected it, rearranged it, and run some tests against it to see how it works. The result is fascinating if bizarre, and even when the beat kicks in, it always feels alien and disturbed. Maybe this is what hip hop would sound like if the vocals were left in time capsules for some future race of producers to play with.

On the other hand, the second disc of Steeltounged is a completely different story. By handing the title track over to a cartel of remixers, Hecq effectively gives up his style and perspective and lets others bring some variation. I'll admit that a single disc featuring twelve remixes of the same song didn't sound like a good idea when I saw the liner notes, but because Hecq's original is so vague in its intent, the remixes sound nothing alike and for the most part they sound nothing like the original--and that's a great thing. The remix disc winds up sounding like a great mix curated by Hecq instead of a self-indulgent tribute to a single song. Xabec turns in a strong and melodic take on the theme while Mothboy's grimey bass and Team Doyobi's complete reworking are both fantastic. Oddly, the remix disc may give us a little more insight into Hecq the man and the artist than the disc of originals. Together, the two discs add up to something more than their parts, and for once the remix album serves a purpose beyond being mere promotional filler. I needed something more human than Hecq's detached lens on the world provided, and in the remixes, I found it. I'll be interested to see if any of that energy translates into Boysen's future work, or if he'll continue to peer at us through his particularly controlled pinhole.

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20 June 2009

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Albums and Singles

As fitting a split as could be, this album joins two of rock's most experimental experimentalists in a meeting of minds that, as any split should do, provides new insights into the output of both artists, creating a fitting relationship between these two diverging takes on weird.

Beta-lactam Ring

The disc opens with Volcano the Bear's five tracks, whose sumptuously layered take is, comparitevely at least, the more palattible of the two. Not that that means much here. "Our Number of Wolves" drifts from concrete scratch to ultra-slow New Orleans funeral music as covered by European avant-improvisers, while "The Boy with the Lips Inside" presents a spare beat and odd hummed melodies that trickle outward like some hi-fidelity field recording from hillsides yet uncovered, never presenting too much or getting carried away.

This comfort working with a single idea can be seen throughout here, as the extended "The Open, the Closed" presents sputtering synth lines and odd feedback that grows, shrinks, and grows again over its eight elliptical minutes. It is a compelling and, as is typical for the group, exceptionally well paced sonic descent before "Death Sleeps in the Ear" and the cosmically titled "The First Circle is the Eye" see the group moving deeper into the abyss.

La STPO, a relatively large ensemble of like-minded musical players (and I mean that in both senses) takes over from here, displaying their knack for oddly orchestrated mini-symphonies on tracks like "Guayaki," which could just as well be a meeting between gamelan classicists and early Zorn game pieces, and "Les Oreilles Internationales," whose silly and sputtering stop-starts, overrun with vocal antics, lunges deeply out of sync with any conventional genre trappings.

"Invalid Islands," opening with bent reed and string slides, eventually drifts into a kind of ether-drenched poetry before turning around and harkening toward a downtown aesthetic that's as much Pere Ubu as it is Branca, let alone Material. The closing "Colonies" is just as chaotic, jumping between sytles and approaches at a moment's notice while remaining entirely together and cohesive.

Given the strength of the music here, and the vast potential of such a tag-team as this, it seems a shame almost that the split wasn't done track by track. Given the world music influences, open sonic stances and moment's notice phrase changes of both groups, it seems like, rather than splitting the disc down the middle, this offering could just as easily alternate every other track. While the relationship of both groups is highly apparent here, perhaps there would be even more to discuss were they presented side by side and title by title. That said, this works too.

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20 June 2009

Administrator

Albums and Singles

A recent discovery to listeners in this country perhaps, Omar Souleyman has nevertheless been a staple of, in the words of the press release, "Syrian street-level folk-pop" for years now. This collection unearths some of his strongest moments put to tape, compiled and lovingly assembled by the always on point Sublime Frequencies imprint. The result is a non-stop collection of the singer's signature grooves, which stand tall beside this shore's often paltry pop offerings.

Sublime Frequencies

It is always a difficult job task to listen to foreign music without bringing too many cultual expectations into the mix, but here most of those expectations are shattered in seconds. Immediately identifiable as an import, the work manages to erase any preconceptions, meeting its audience well beyond the halfway point and, arms folded, declaring itself with confident poise. From the opening "Leh Jani," whose snaking synth lines are met by Souleyman's instantly catchy melodic chanting, it is clear that this is a wholly conceived and realized musical approach.

That approach is marked by a dichotomy between the spare instrumental presence—most of it being played with only an accompanying synthesizer, guitar and drum machine, it seems—and the full, even over-the-top quality of the sounds used. Used in conjunction with traditional sounding melodies only deepens the strength of these works. "Dabke 2001," for example, presents frantically melodic arpeggiations engaging in a call and response with the singer as a steady up-tempo pulse pushes the whole thing forward. With synth tones resembling computerized guitar shredding, the piece is at once a kind of low-tech dance music and, conversely, a hyper-futuristic sounding space serenade.

The slower numbers are just as strong, often providing even more space for the eccentricities of the sound to come to the fore. "Atabat," an eight-minute mostly instrumental excursion, has a tempo so slow that the pitch-shifted melodies bring out the distintive potential of playing music whose melodic content extends beyond the limitations of the keyboard itself. Odd chirps enter and accentuate while the guitar frenetically dances above, further developing the content present throughout.

The nearly psychedelic beginning to "Bashar Ya Habib Al Shaab," with foreboding synth lines and Souleyman's echoing vocal refrains, is at once grating and cosmically attuned, relentless in its power before hastening the pace over halfway through to take part in a kind of droning rap. "Don't Wear Black, Green Suits You Better" continues in the poppier end of the program with more interlocking lines between the three main melodic providers.

Known for the dark sunglasses he adorns nearly always, Souleyman is a true Syrian legend who, we can hope, will finally have a chance to be appreciated outside of his homeland. Given the immense versatility of his outfit and the undeniable power of his vocal delivery, perhaps this is Souleyman's opportunity to extend his listenership. For now, Highway to Hassake is a fine intro to the singer's enormous output.

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