OMAR SOULEYMAN - 'HIGHWAY TO HASSAKE'
Remember when you did study abroad in Europe? And there was that one time when you all went to some big beer hall, and there was all manner of lusty merriment and liberal consumption of spirits, and you had some great bratwurst and your girlfriend who was drunk and came in late sat in the lap of some bald old grifter that somebody was friends with, and shouted italian at him and kissed him twice on the cheek, and your friend was doubled over in laughter because some drunken lout was trying unsuccessfully to grind on his date, and you kept pounding your glass on the counter to the throbbing mariachi gypsy balkan whatever it is music, the kind that they have to stop playing after two or three songs or the patrons will pass out? Then you and your girlfriend made out in a corner and then danced wildly, falling into strangers but never, never spilling a drop of beer?
That's Radegast Beer Hall, now open in Williamsburg.
Then afterwards you were so, so hungry, your guts were burning, and you went to that brightly lit late night mediterranean place and got falafel, and your wasted eyes were transfixed by the bizarre music video playing on the tv high in the corner of the room, with high-speed electronic beats and weird phased instruments, and a litany of cable-access special visual effects, so much that you dubbed the music 'psychedelic falafel jams'?
That's Omar Souleyman, from Syria, a collection of whose music now appears on Sublime Frequencies.
OMAR SOULEYMAN - 'LEH JANI'
