Rabih Beaini (Morphosis)

Albidaya in Arabic means The Beginning, which in the case of Beaini’s, might be the return to t he beginnings, or the start of the path. The album is conceptually a revisiting of the traditional and early psychedelic Arabic music, all through distorted paths and instruments, remashed and deconstructed sounds, recreating patterns with diverse instruments to give a different perspective of the sound itself. Includes musicians from Upperground Piero Bittolo Bon and Tommaso Cappellato. Commissioned by Annihaya in Lebanon by Sharif Sehnaoui, Raed Yassin and Hatem Imam – includes artwork by Maria Kassab. “Almost entirely recorded in a day, and featuring cello, saxophone and drums in addition to electronics, Albidaya doesn’t attempt to replicate Lebanese folk music. Instead, it articulates a point of contact between various worlds.” Rory Gibb for the Wire. “dips into the ethnically charged concepts and neo-traditionalisms of Annihaya, traversing through a panorama of sounds and textures. Eastern twang, middle eastern thematics and jazz all play a role in Albidaya, as do tribals drums and marketplace noise with the introduction of live and off the cuff synth experiments, arpeggiated space transmissions and eerie Wu-Tang like vocal samples entrapped in a gurgling soup of analogue beef. Brief clips of the entire album are available to stream below should the preceding description not provide sufficient appetite whetting.

• 1 Light Within A Light
• 2 Maple And Rocks
• 3 Kessara 1
• 4 Taranta3000
• 5 Ya Shater
• 6 Kessara 3
• 7 Song Of Extreme Happiness
• 8 Kessara 2