ALBIDAYA by RABIH BEAINI

New album from Morphine man Rabih Beani! In Arabic means The Beginning, which in the case of Beaini’s, might be the return to the 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.”