SIHR is the product of a Mediterranean post-anything quartet that offers new and eclectic folklore for a devastated planet and troubled time, but, is still, experimenting in all directions. The quartet works in a fertile no-man’s-land where trance and contemplation, jazz and electronica, acoustics and electricity would merge in a stimulating mystical magma.
The quartet features French multi-instrumentalist Frédéric D. Oberland, the leader of the Oiseaux-Tempête collective and co-curator of the Nahal Recordings, who merges avant-rock and free jazz, repetitive music and electronics; French electric guitarist-oud player-composer-photographer Grégory Dargent, who leads H and recorded before with Oberland (Inland HIZZ Cairo, 2020), who cultivates his musical schizophrenia through improvised music, trance music, jazz, hijacked maqam, repetitive music, pop, electro-acoustic installations and French chanson; Lebanese, Berlin-based bassist Tony Elieh, one of the pioneers of experimental music in Lebanon, a founding member of the first post-rock group of post-war Lebanon, The Scrambled Eggs, and member of the Middle-Eastern supergroup Karkhana; And French percussionist Wassim Halal, who also plays in H and leads the gamelan band Polyphème, who uses a new pedal generating «random taksim».
SIHR is the debut album of this genre-defying quartet, recorded in a bunker studio somewhere between Paris and Berlin over three days of improvised sound bacchanalia in April 2022. The spiritual-hallucinogenic music of this quartet attempts to suggest a Babelian language, a synergy of many different soundworlds and many more sonic possibilities, that would transform the into a ceremonial act. SIHR possesses you with its soulful power and hypnotic pulses, or as the quartet describes its healing effect as «too many tangos danced on the glowing ashes of our days».
Shadowcracker documents the meeting of Polish drummer-musicologist Adam Gołębiewski, who has performed and recorded with Yoko Ono, Thurston Moore, Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson) with Lebanese guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui (of Karkhana and «A» Trio, with whom he recorded Meet The Dragon, Uznam, 2017) and bassist Elieh. The album was recorded at Tunefork Studios in Beirut. The three pieces offer raw and thorny, powerful dynamics that push the sonic envelope of the trio into its distorted and dirtiest extremes but are often ornamented with infectious, propulsive rhythmic patterns. The last, 20-minute «Ode to Łódź» experiments with resonant and noisy, alien-ambient textures.
Eyal Hareuveni
Frédéric D. Oberland (modular, Buchla & drum synthesizers, alto sax, electric guitar, voice), Grégory Dargent (electric oud, guitar, analog synthesizers, bells), Tony Elieh (electric bass, cellphone synthesizers), Wassim Halal (darbuka, bendirs, bells, augmented percussion), Sharif Sehnaoui (electric guitar), Adam Gołębiewski (drums)
