Said, Rizan: Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi LP

"Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi" is the new album on Kou Records by Rizan Said, the legendary Kurdish-Syrian keyboard virtuoso from Ras Al Ain in the Jazeera region of northeastern Syria, and the primary musical architect behind Omar Souleyman. Said is a musical ambassador from a disappeared Syria. Once upon a time, not too long ago, the Jazeera - a culturally rich borderland of Kurdish, Arab, Syriac, and Armenian communities - was alive with a distinctive sonic tradition: hand drums and reed flutes, weddings that lasted days, dabke that had been going on for centuries before electro, disco, or orientalism arrived to name it. Rizan was the boy wonder of that scene, a prodigy on percussion and reed instruments who became the region's master synthesist - programming Korgs to emulate zurna, saz, tanbura, and buzuq, collapsing traditional instrumentation into a single pair of hands moving at lightning speed. This is his third solo album and his most far-reaching. Recorded at Sigur Ros's Sundlaugin Studio in Iceland and produced by Randall Dunn, with co-production by Mark Gergis (Syrian Cassette Archives), Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi pushes Syrian and Kurdish dabke into uncharted sonic territory: seven pieces that carry the heat and velocity of the cassette circuit into something wider, stranger, and more alive than ever.