did i dance?  did i dance?  like a fucking fiend i did.

it really don’t get much better than this.  like some bastard chimeric beast composed of ceilidh, rave, jimi hendrix, gospel, desert psyche fucking handclapping toetapping freakout.

oof it was hot down there.  like the sahara itself.  which musta been nice for group doueh being from the sahara and all.

so there’s four of them.  bamaar salmou, the titular doueh, leading the line with chops, licks, relentless virtuosity that he makes look eyewateringly easy.  resembling moses hightower from police academy, resplendent in white robes and shades but sounding somewhere between hendrix and joe meek.  a blur of fingers and laconic musical iconoclasm.  the group features his singing dancing tbal bashing wife halima, his son jamal on keys and friend bashiri on vocals.

they play this loose, free, desert psyche kindof blues.  guitar (and tinidit) based, traditional roots, western flourishes.  it’s ecstatic, joyful, footshuffly music.  it’s hypnotic gospelish meditative brainstroking genius.  raw, powerful and wah-frazzled.  beautiful.

i’m wondering how in the name of sweet baby jeebus anyone follows this…

in the following fashion apparently: shelves of keyboards, korgs and electronick drums.  dude effortlessly firing out twangs of machine gun fingerpicking on saz.  and yr man omar.  dressed in mustache, dark glasses, headscarf.  five hundred albums in a fifteen year career.

it’s part dabke, part techno, part freestyle rhyming.  like some arabic techno ceilidh.  a regular folk/pop poetry party.  belted at at one fifty beats per minute.  frantic squeals of phased keyboards and frenetic drumbeats.

euphoric it was.  euphoric. proof if proof were needed that rhythm and melody are universal, transcendant.

sublime frequencies indeed.

i love sublime frequencies in the same way i do mississippi records.  their releases are like pokemom, gotta catch em all.  limited runs, favoured on vinyl, and a bugger to get a hold of generally.  founded by hisham mayet and the sun city girls bishop brothers.  they deal in the above mentioned folk pop radio collaged street music from africa, asia, the middle east.  all a million miles (oh the irony…) from the packaged world (and what the fuck does that mean anyway, are we all not in/on the same world?) music generally foisted onto us like some differentcolourskinned enya shit.

proffering up the sound of the streets and the bars and the buskers and the land it comes from.  and retaining all the honest to goodness garish brain mangling freaked authenticity in the process.  not sanitised.  not repackaged. not intellectualised.  none of yr chinstroking acedemia or righteous ethnographation here.  it’s world music in the sense that it sounds like a detuned radio broadcast from another world.

yup.

sublime frequencies