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Land Of Kush's Egyptian Light Orchestra
Monogamy

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    CST066   2x180gLP • CD • DL

    Release date: 01 June 2010

    Duration: 1:06:03

     

    Sam Shalabi’s Land Of Kush project returns: his psych-arabic jazz orchestra has produced a second album of intensely genre-defying, polymorphic, big band madness. Where Shalabi structured last year’s mesmerising Against The Day album around the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, this time Shalabi tackles concepts of shame, sexuality and society in a new multi-movement work entitled Monogamy.

    Rounding up many of the same Montreal-based improv and experimental players featured on Against The Day, Shalabi deploys a cast of two dozen musicians and sound artists to realise this fantastic new compositional hybrid of Middle Eastern tropes and Western vocabularies of jazz, psychedelia and experimental/free music. For the Monogamy album, the group has been given it’s own sub-moniker as The Egyptian Light Orchestra.

    The band is a truly hydra-headed beast on this recording; string, brass and woodwinds careen around the drone/backbeat of the major movements, shifting between short melodic punctuations, free excursions, and consolidated unison lines. Dissonant piano, synth and electronics bubble below, above and at the outer limits of the mix. Several transitions also allow for various players to stretch out in some lovely virtuosic solo passages. Shalabi’s oud anchors the album’s opening and closing pieces, as well as the glorious “Tunnel Visions” piece at the album’s midpoint. The rhythm section – comprising standard trap kits, upright basses and traditional Eastern percussion – holds down one hypnotic groove after another.

    Shalabi has once again structured his orchestral work to feature primarily female vocalists who further challenge the categorisation of the music, conjuring everything from Galas- or Ono-style ululation (“The 1st And The Last”) to cabaret/jazz (“Scars”) to ethereal psych-folk (“Tunnel Visions”). He also employs a recurring digitally-processed voice track of “dirty” glossal phrases and cut-ups that interacts rhythmically and conceptually with the work. This sonic through-line frames and re-frames the music as psycho-sexual commentary and narrative, imbuing Monogamy’s many stylistic moments and movements with a higher conceptual power: frustration/liberation, chastity/carnality, innocence/shame, purity/impurity. Of course there’s a ‘healthy’ dose of id at play here as well – particularly on “Fisherman”, where the emotionless, robotic voice takes over in a steady stream of irreverent, desecrating, potty-mouthed absurdism. The album’s title track “Monogamy” fittingly rallies the work’s conceptual terrain, with a gorgeous vocal melody spinning a concise alphabetised summation:

    A is for the apple tree
    B is for Beelzebub and he’s the snake
    C is for the curse of Ham
    D is for the drugs that you’re now forced to take
    E is for eternity
    F is for the fucking that you did outside
    G is for the Giving Tree
    H is for the Holy Spirit’s bride
    And all of this comes out
    
In little birdlike trills
    You’ll reach for paper towels
    To clean up all your spills
     


    PACKAGING NOTES

    2 x 180gLP comes in a thick 24pt. jacket printed in balck with matte a UV varnish and 11"x11" art/credit insert.

    CD comes in a custom gatefold jacket printed on 100% recycled 18pt. paperboard with a matte UV varnish.

      

    CREDITS

    Sam Shalabi, oud, composition & direction
    Thierry Amar, contrebasse
    Michel Bonneau, percussion
    Nicolas Caloia, cello
    Patrick Conan, percussion
    Marie Davidson, voice
    Luke Dawson, contrebasse
    Omar Dewachi, oud & saz
    Xarah Dion, synthesizers & piano
    Ariel Engle, voice & verse
    David Gossage, flutes
    Genevieve Heistek, viola
    Elizabeth Lima, clarinet
    Katie Moore, voice & verse
    Nadia Moss, synthesizers
    Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, voice, verse & cassettes
    Alexandre St-Onge, electronics
    Jason Sharp, baritone & bass saxophone
    Gavin John Sheehan, classical guitar
    Molly Sweeney, voice & verse
    Elizabeth Anka Vajagic, voice & verse
    Nathan Ward, percussion
    Josh Zubot, violin


    Lyrics on “Scars” by Elizabeth Anka Vajagic.
    Lyrics on “Tunnel Visions” by Katie Moore.
    Lyrics on “Fisherman” by Ariel Engle.
    Lyrics on “Monogamy” by Molly Sweeney.
    Lyrics on “Like The Thread Of A Spider” by the peoples of the Syrian Arab Republic.

    The voice of ‘Junior’ was written and recorded by Sam Shalabi and Gavin Sheehan.

    “Boo” is an improvisation by Elizabeth Lima and Luke Dawson based on “Scars”.

    Recorded & mixed at Thee Mighty Hotel2Tango by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh in the autumn of 2009 & winter of 2010.
    Mastered at Grey Market in Montreal by Harris Newman.


    Artwork, photography and layout by Maya Moumne and Radwan Ghazi Moumneh.