Electronic Genes - Yousef Kawar.. click to hear it
Untitled Tracks
On Alternative Music in Beirut is a collection of texts and photos which begins to chart the manifold, mutating and increasingly visible alternative musical landscapes in Beirut. Click to read more.
SunDance - Omar Kamel
The two albums Sundance and Moonrise were designed to work as catchy danceable world-music with Oriental, Latin, and Asian influences...
Psalms - Khaled Jubran
Is oriental music a “Tarab” dedicated servant by definition? Is it really doomed to express only “ecstatic joy” or “devastating sorrow”?
Note: If your address is in Egypt, Lebanon, or Jordan, you can pay cash on delivery and pay no shipping charges! Minimum Order: USD 12.99.
Album Description:
Omar’s first release was Shabaka, Egypt’s first electronic music album, and is still a reference within the growing Egyptian art-music scene, with tracks like ‘El Mowatin El Salih’, ‘Ta7rik El Gism’, and ‘Yawm El Ghadab’.
Shabaka, co-produced with Yanni Giovanos in 2001 was Egypt’s first electronic music album, and is still a reference within the growing Egyptian art-music scene. Mixing melodies and beats with recordings from TV and radio programs, speaches, and songs, Shabaka creates a very subtle “musical criticism” of Egyptian society.
Omar says:
Shabaka started off as a playful experiment. Having played live instruments for years, Yanni Giovanos and myself (Omar Kamel) started messing around with some software releases, and some loop libraries, throwing things together, recording speech samples from Egyptian television and Egyptian radio, mixing it all together, and playing live instruments on top of it all. It was fun and we had a good time doing it.
Pretty soon, we both had a few tracks each, and decided that we both liked what the other had made and that the material, although markedly different, was somehow kin, bound by our choice of media samples, by the overall Elektro-Cairo thematics, and by our mess-around-and-try-it-out mentality. We threw things around, and if it sounded good, we kept it.
Shabaka
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