Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi [2xLP]

Rizan Said - Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi [2xLP]

Ma Waraa Al-Shaabi — "Beyond 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.

Once upon a time, 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. 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, following King of Keyboard (Annihaya, 2015) and Saz U Dilan (Akuphone, 2019) — and his most far-reaching. Recorded at Sigur Rós'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.