Omar Souleyman @ Pumpehuset, CPH.
We are pleased to announce that on Saturday, 5th of march, our dear Omar Souleyman is coming to Copenhague!
He will be acting at Pumpehuset, a decent historical building that was transformed into a musical venue, located at the heart of Copenhagen. The event is curated by Smash!Bang!Pow!, one of the most active event promoters around town. But let’s go with the man himself. For the ones that don’t know him, Omar Souleyman is a Syrian legend with more than 500 studio and live cassettes - most of them recorded during Syrian weddings, which he then gave away as presents to the freshly married couples. His music is a reflection of the diversity of his region of birth, the village Tell Tamer, in the northeastern part of Syria. It can be considered as a fusion of Syrian, Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish styles driven by Arabic keyboard solos and wild break-neck speed rhythms. Souleyman’s milieu is dabke, a style of folk dance music that can be found at large social gatherings in the Middle East, built around complex instrumental leads, exhortative singing and trance-inducing rhythms. It’s an old style, but in recent years it has had a creative renaissance when dabke artists, realising that this form actually shares structural similarities with Western electronic dance music, began incorporating synthesizers and four-on-the-floor drum machines into their compositions.
Omar Souleyman’s first appearance in the western music culture happened after the American ethnographic music label Sublime Frequencies released some of his material in 2007. After a time, his popularity started to increase in musical circles that did not focus on commercial music, triggered by some remixes that appeared by the icelandic artist Björk in 2011. In the very same year he started to be booked by some of the most important international music venues, such as the Glastonbury Festival in the UK, the Paredes de Coura or the a.t.p. in London that was actually curated by Caribou.
However, he made his major impact when in 2013 Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) produced Souleyman’s first studio album called Wenu Wenu, which then was released by the Brooklyn based label Ribbon Music. Although one can slightly perceive some of Four Tet’s specific synthesisers and effects alongside a few of the songs of Wenu Wenu, the album never sounds as if Kieran would want it to sound like his own work, or as a piece of Western style music.
After this release he performed at festivals like the Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the Worldwide Music Festival organised by Gilles Peterson, the Distortion here in Copenhagen, and an event of the Red Bull Music Academy in Madrid, where we had the great pleasure to enjoy his music for the first time live.
Now Omar Souleyman is back with a new record under his arm: Bahdeni Nami. It is his second studio album released in 2015 at Monkeytown, the record label headed by the German duo Modeselektor. His new album is inspired by the beats of his first record, but this time Gilles Peterson and Modeselektor have joined Four Tet in the process of production - although their influences are nearly at all perceivable this time: it would have been easy to feel tempted to influence Souleyman’s music, but on the contrary, it seems like his musical style was inherently respected. It seems like Omar’s intention is not to reinvent himself; rather his music must be taken such as to enjoyed live or during a party, and this objective is without doubt met in Bahdeni Nami, since his songs are a genuine invitation to start dancing.
Still, we would say that his music can compete against any kind of dance music being produced right now, and succeed. Dabke has its ability to make people move and dance while setting their mind free, thanks to this frenetic sounds never heard before in western music culture.
If you are around town, we highly recommend you to verify by yourself everything you have read above. The date is next Saturday at Pumpehuset, Copenhagen. Make sure your don’t miss it!
Ps: Last year, Omar published a letter addressed to his homeland, announcing that he would begin raising and donating money to “help Syrian people fleeing to a better life elsewhere.”
