Published
Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 17:26
- Bedouin Trax was made from samples of music from Islamic cultures.
Bedouin Records will release a new double album from Eomac on August 13th.
The record was the Dubai-based label's idea: they sent Lakker member Ian McDonnell, AKA Eomac, music from "the Arabic and Islamic worlds for him to sample and manipulate into tracks for an EP," according to a statement. The project quickly grew into a full album, as McDonnell wrote over 30 tracks built from "Moroccan street music... songs from Baghdad, Islamic music from India, Sufi ceremonies" with detailed notes on the instruments used and the meanings and context behind each source. There's also a reportedly a live show based on this material in the works.
"The project developed over the course of a year where I experimented with various styles and genres, different shades and colours, different emotional states," McDonnell says. "It began with a long arduous task of sifting through the hours of music I was sent and cataloguing every potentially useful sample."
"Bedouin felt the music they had in mind was an unexplored well of inspiration, potential and influence for Western musicians. I think it was interesting for them to suggest that an Irish musician living in Berlin should be the one to play with these sounds... I have always loved and been inspired by these kinds of sounds, the textures, the percussion and also the spiritual nature of some of this music—the morning calls to prayer, sung verses of the Quran. I didn't know what the words meant, but the sound and the voice and the intention I always found very beautiful and very inspiring."
"Cries of cultural appropriation abound, and the ethics of all this still up in the air. But we are all human on this planet, we all breathe the same air, our similarities are far greater than our differences. We can be touched deeply on a human level by music from anywhere in the world... A beautiful thing about the digital age is that if we choose to, we can see how deeply connected we all are, and we can start to find some truth about what it means to be human. Exploring other cultures and the artforms within is as good a place as any to start."
Bedouin is a UAE techno label that has so far featured the likes of Hieroglyphic Being, Bintus, John Heckle, Ryo Murakami and Healing Force Project.
Listen to "Same Heart, Same Breath, Same Life, Same Death."
Tracklist
A1 Entrance
A2 Ascension
B1 Same Heart, Same Breath, Same Life, Same Death
B2 Ritual
B3 Prayer Pt. 1
C1 Toward An Entity Of Oneness
C2 Oasis
D1 Incantation
D2 Gather To Move, Gather To Live, Gather To Be
D3 Jani Mun
Bedouin Records will release Bedouin Trax on August 13th, 2016.