by Gerald Van Waes
I had to lay this album aside for a while because it’s main focus was a bit too much of a different world than ours. I needed the right angle as an entrance to find total comfort in it.
I knew already Osama Abdulrasol’s previous project with singer Melike, in essence this wasn’t too different from before. The trio is a cooperation of a Turkish singer (Melike Tarhan), Iraqi kanun (sounding slightly like the Persian santur from it’s neighbouring country), and cello by Lode Vercampt. At a certain point there’s a chamber orchestral arrangement, elsewhere a moody drone, a few great alternations of instrumental duet improvisations between kanun and cello, from dynamic to close moody and harmonious gliding together.
The album sounds like another song cycle which unfolds itself like a story on stage, a mostly melancholy love story of personal longing, at times unreachable like an image from a fairy tale. At some point later there’s a more happy sounding song. Strangely enough the melancholy sounds more recognisable for we don’t understand the backgrounds of the happenings enough. In that way the music could have needed a little bit more help. The lyrical themes are included with words in the booklet, and the instrumentals gives us time to balance our perception and get better into the moods behind the concept, but just a little change can already make questions and disorientation, for we cannot follow the whole movement through that easily. Just a little bit of poetic spoken word or so in a different language could have helped on these small moments (just a suggestion), or projected images.
Never the less it does provides a glimpse of a different world, which Lode Vercampt on cello already adapted well.