Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi

Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi -"Beyond S haabi"- is the new album on Kou Records by Rizan Said, legendary Kurdish-Syrian keyboard virtuoso and primary musical architect behind Omar S ouleyman. A musical ambassador from a disappeared Syria, Rizan was the boy wonder of the Jazeera region's cassette circuit programming Korgs to emulate zurna, saz, tanbura, and buzuq, collapsing traditional instrumentation into a single pair of hands at lightning speed. His third solo album, recorded at Sigur Rós's Sundlaugin Studio in Iceland and produced by Randall Dunn with co-production by Mark Gergis (Syrian Cassette Archives), pushes Syrian and Kurdish dabke into uncharted sonic territory seven pieces carrying the heat and velocity of the cassette circuit into something wider, stranger, and more alive than ever.