Omar Souleyman is a nonstop party machine. A Syrian wedding singer, he’ impassive behind his aviator shades and traditional kufiya headwear, prowling the stage, earnestly proclaiming his declarations of love and revving up the crowd over banging Syrian techno. Strangely enough despite over 500 cassette releases in his native Syria, admittedly mostly recorded live at weddings with the names of guests cleverly inserted into songs (thus promoting sales), this is actually his first studio recording. This is pretty weird given his collaborator on synth, and the architect of Souleyman’ remarkable sound Rizan actually runs a studio in Syria. But their refusal to record in this space probably has more to do with the fact that the wedding circuit in Syria is considerably more lucrative than the pop circuit. He’ of course had a few compilations issued in the West, firstly on Sublime Frequencies and later on their subsidiary Sham Palace. Until now his best sounding recording came from Haflat Gharbia (Western Concerts) chronicling his tour of the west, including a track from the Northcote Social Club in Melbourne.
For Wenu Wenu he’ gone into a studio in Brooklyn with Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) of all people and the extra fidelity is immediately apparent. Souleyman’ sound is tied to his homeland. Hailing from Ras Al Ain, located in northeastern Syria near the Iraqi and Turkish border his music is an off the chart mélange of Dabke, Choubi, Chewali, Turkish and Kurdish music. It’s music designed for the party, highly percussive with frenetic webs of synthetic snaking Middle Eastern melodies. Souleyman has a gruff growl to his voice, yet the emotion is palpable. Hebden’ flourishes are minimal, he seems to have decided to let them plug and play, but is determined to get the best sound from what is essentially a live album. You get the sense that the reverbs on some of the vocals, the subtle variations from song to song to the texture his voice, or even the way some of Rizan’ typically mind blowing synth and percussion work seems to evolve texturally through the life of the song have Hebden’ fingerprints on them. It seems clear that Hebden wanted to fight audio fatigue; the layering in the mix does differ, despite the minimal ingredients for each song. Rizan displays his virtuosity effortlessly; you can almost see him just lifting a few fingers to do these incredible electronic hand percussion rolls.
One thing Wenu Wenu does is provide us in the West with an album proper for the first time. Subsequently its not all pounding Syrian tech freak-outs, a cherry picked assortment of Souleyman’ greatest hits. There are actually some less frenetic pieces here, even perhaps hypnotic music. This is peaks and troughs Souleyman style. Don’ get me wrong, it’s all very beat based, and though they’re not all 4 to the floor bangers, when they are, there are few who can match Souleyman in full flight.
