The Arabic Room - الغرفة العربية | Mephisto Halabi - مفيستو حلبي | Musica Telharmonia Internacionale (Viva!)

The Arabic Room - الغرفة العربية

by Mephisto Halabi - مفيستو حلبي

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1.	Watch On The Orient part I 05:41	buy track
2.	Live Station Identification Broadcast From The Centrale 06:18	buy track
3.	The Esoteric Ordnance Of Howling Mystics 05:40	buy track
4.	Rana Ransom Dance Floor Crasher 03:37	buy track
5.	Killer In The Sky 08:44	buy track
6.	The New Sandy Bull Shit 08:05	buy track
7.	Watch On The Orient part II 04:21	buy track

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VINYL ALBUM ON UNROCK ARE GO!!!. US ORDERS ARE AVAILABLE HERE:

www.forcedexposure.com/Catalog/halabi-mephisto-the-arabic-room-lp/UNROCK.023LP.html

In Europe, orders will be available through Cargo Records (UK), and UNROCK (Germany).

Visit UNROCK at www.unrock.de

Reviews:
The Wire: www.thewire.co.uk/issues/454

"THE RESULTS ARE STRAIGHT FROM THE LAB OF A MAD SCIENTIST, WITH SOUNDS AND IDEAS BOILING OVER THEIR BEAKERS AND TEST TUBES, WRECKING EVERYTHING IN THEIR PATH. (8/10)" www.popmatters.com/mephisto-halabi-arabic-room-review

"THE ARABIC ROOM SUCCEEDS AT EVERY LEVEL. THIS IS EASILY ONE OF MY FAVORITE ALBUMS OF 2021. INCREDIBLE STUFF." foxydigitalis.zone/2021/11/22/mephisto-halabi-the-arabic-room/

Interview:
foxydigitalis.zone/2021/10/28/mephisto-halabi-is-julius-masri-an-interview/

Mixtape album of all original works, veering into all sorts of musical genres. Exploration of Orientalist tropes so thick that Edward Sa3id is rolling in his grave.

This album originally began as a documentation of extended drum techniques, and due to an open timeframe and a propensity to include instruments obsessively picked up and learned over the years, it developed into a project with a more ambitious scope. I allowed the work to accumulate intentions and guiding principles, and it became rather autobiographical in nature. It eventually morphed into a critical meditation on variations of Orientalism practiced by Arabs themselves, as well as those who were born and raised within the diaspora....Some of the tracks here refer to locations or sounds I grew up with in Tripoli, Lebanon during the 1980s.
The "Arabic Room" of the title refers to the sitting room in my childhood home that was decked out in hyper orientalist exoticism, mashing together furniture, fixtures, paintings from all over the Arabic speaking world. The sitting room, or salon, is common in Lebanese homes made specifically to host and entertain guests. Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade and other western made Orientalist cultural artifacts not only had ubiquitous presence in our house, but also found their way onto tv shows and commercials. After moving to the US, my parents recreated this room in their home. Additionally, my father's generation was one that saw their country transform from a post-agrarian trading society after WWII to a center of banking and finance within the span of a few decades. The sense of some lost Eden-like era of the interwar years permeated much of the media that was available to me growing up there. This album is meant as neither ironic nor as a judgmental pronouncement, but more as a form of critical nostalgia.
All instruments are performed by myself, (drums, Egyptian rababa, Azeri kamancheh, circuit bent electronics, keyboards, hammered dulcimer, and vocals). Genre-hopping is foundational to the album’s ethos; jazz, metal, experimental, electro-chaabi, and sound collage all appear within the framework of Arabic music, creating the sense of adventurous possibilities best associated with well curated mixtapes.

credits

released November 20, 2021

Drums and Hammered Dulcimer recorded by Christopher Andrew McDonald in Philadelphia, May, 2017. Voice, Synths, Kemenche recorded at the West Philly HyperCube, 2017-2020

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