Omar Souleyman - To Syria, With Love

The Quietus

The story of Omar Souleyman remains unique even in these vaguely enlightened, increasingly globalised times. Several other artists from the Middle East have managed to cross over to a western audience, but the sheer realness of Omar Souleyman remains miraculously intact. He’s not some traditionalist Syrian folk act wheeled out under the ‘world music’ banner, nor is he a slick pop singer playing what’s essentially western music with an exotic twist.

Okay, perhaps Souleyman’s music is something of a modern update of dabke - a traditional folk dance from his part of the world - but it’s made with a focused vision and unshakeable energy even many of the modern Tuareg rockers from Mali and Mauritania can’t match. Souleyman’s dabke is as repetitive and ecstatic as motorik or minimal techno, never straying from its purpose: to get people dancing. It’s as jagged and sheer as house music, ready to blast out of a car stereo, unlike the Lawrence Of Arabia soft focus heat haze that adorns Tuareg rock. After years of fair success, Souleyman’s relatively ugly, digital, crystal-clear music still sounds cheap. The shape of most songs haven’t altered much either, and his delivery remains almost entirely unchanged. Most of the tempos are even bloody identical. Yet somehow, sticking with this streamlined simplicity makes To Syria, With Love his most potent record in years.

When Souleyman shifted from releasing music via Sham Palace and Sublime Frequencies (both labels associated with his original champion, Mark Gergis), to putting out the Four Tet produced Wenu Wenu on Domino in 2013, the man emerged from obscurity and lo-fidelity into uncharted territory for a Syrian wedding singer. 2015’s follow-up Bahdeni Nami added Modeselektor, Legowelt, and Gilles Peterson to Souleyman’s list of collaborators - but the formula began to wear slightly thin. Whatever it was that happened (I can’t really speculate), Souleyman jettisoned any acoustic instruments from his setup, along with longtime synths-and-rhythms man Rizan Sa’id, who’s now been replaced by Hasan Alo, also from Al-Hasakah in northwestern Syria like Souleyman.

Admittedly the resultant change is far from huge - Omar Souleyman’s music is often far too formulaic for that - but born out of the very slightest trimming back (the entire musical operation is now just Souleyman and his keyboard player), there’s an undoubted increased urgency to these tunes. This may come as somewhat surprising news to those of you keeping count, as To Syria, With Love has come out via Mad Decent, aka Diplo’s label. So Omar Souleyman is now labelmates with Major Lazer and Jack Ü. By most accepted logic this shouldn’t be a better record than the two produced by Four Tet. But it is.

The conflict that continues to tear Syria to pieces, and that displaced both Souleyman and Alo, has been an elephant in the room for Souleyman’s recent career. His songs, with lyrics written by old friend and collaborator Shawah Al Ahmad, have always focused on love and romance. No surprise there, considering this is music designed for weddings and dancing - nobody wants to spend their wedding reception jigging to songs about IS and bombings. As implied by the title though, To Syria, With Love is a bit of a shift. The Syrian plight is mentioned directly, and Souleyman is really starting to sound like he misses his homeland.

“We are in exile, and our nights are long / Our homeland is our only comfort / Life caused us so much pain our wounds are too many and every wound calls out, ‘We miss Al-Jazira’” (NB: Al-Jazira is one of the names for Souleyman’s home region, also known as Al-Hasakah.)

But what difference does it all make to a non-Arabic speaker anyway? Much of the album sounds as celebratory and joyous as ever. In fact more so! The gigantic stomp and techno-inspired histrionics of opening track ‘Ya Boul Habari’ exudes more energy than anything off the Four Tet albums. Alo’s backing tracks also rely a bit less heavily on the omnipresent dabke handclap, restlessly hitting the ‘drum fill’ button on his keyboard every few seconds. That said, the constant kick of the kick is perhaps the album’s biggest weakness. The producer/keyboardist’s many fresh touches make up for it though; there’s simply more going on. Hell, ‘Aenta Lhabbeytak’ and ‘Khayen’ even have a Latin pop guitar strumming away somewhere in the back.

Downbeat bluesy penultimate track ‘Mawal’ makes it clear Souleyman’s switching some of that joy for despair. The song’s one of the slowest and gentlest he’s produced for years, lumbering along a funereal bassline (although Alo’s right hand never ceases from unfurling those digital Arabic scales and piercing solos). Translated lyrics reveal the tune’s bleeding heart and soul. It’s a pretty heartbreaking summation of what life is like for the five million or more Syrians moved outside of their home country by merciless war: “Oh, I’m tired of looking for home / And asking about my loved ones / My soul is wounded.”

As time goes on, Souleyman’s voice grows gruffer and rougher, scarred by cigarette smoke and his experiences. The handful of slower, gentler, and sadder moments in Souleyman’s discography have always been massive highlights too - but this is the album when his unique position as a relatively well-known Syrian singer in the west nudges him out of that traditional role as wedding entertainment.

It’s shiny, and it’s slick, and it’s a step even further away from his past, issuing tin-can tape recordings and lo-fi dabke epics. I mean, it’s released on bloody Diplo’s label. Some listeners are bound to find this repetitive too, and nowhere near different enough from his previous work. Yet To Syria, With Love is also Souleyman’s heaviest and hardest record since Leh Jani back in 2011.

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Drowned In Sound 70

“Look upon us, O Lord/Our sadness is larger than mountains/We are in exile, and our nights are long/Our homeland is our only comfort/We are in exile, and our nights are long/It’s hard to find comfort.” That is the cry from the heart on the song ‘Chobi’ that defines the tone of the album. Souleyman co-wrote the album’s lyrics with his long-time collaborator Shawah Al Ahmad, who was himself recently imprisoned by Daesh near his home in Aleppo. On To Syria, With Love, Souleyman acts as an emissary, a needed reminder that news reports and parliamentary debate are not the only ways we should allow the Syrian civil war, now six years in and counting, to enter our lives.

All of which may make this album seem daunting, but the stark reality of the lyrics is more than offset by the boundless energy of the music. Souleyman comes from the dabke tradition, the folk Arabian dance defined by pounding, careering rhythms and frenetic keyboard and saz solos. For twenty years, he established a reputation as the most sought-after wedding singer in his nation, releasing over 500 recordings to a febrile black market audience on a more-or-less weekly basis. His inclusion on a 2007 compilation from Sublime Frequencies named ‘Highway To Hassake’ changed his life, however, and the two previous albums to this saw him working with artists from Four Tet to Modeselektor.

As with 2015’s ‘Bahdeni Nami’, Souleyman is at his best when he can cut loose on a classic, high-speed dabke piece. Few artists have released as entrancing and danceable a track in 2017 as ‘Ya Bnayya’, a tour de force for Souleyman’s finger-blurringly virtuoso saz style. ‘Tensana’, a bonus track on this physical issue of the album that had not been available on the previous digital-only release, is similarly exciting, and you realise exactly why so many outside of Syria have fallen for his music at first contact. There is joy simply in hearing a master at work, the phenomenon dubiously described by some as ‘competence porn’, and Souleyman indulges us throughout the record.

Perhaps inevitably, though, after a number of summers sharing stages with Western big-sellers and a growing audience around the globe, the music has begun to evolve too. His compositions have always intersected with electronic production, but his long-time programmer Rizan Sa’id has been phased out for this project, replaced by Hasan Alo, whose signature four-to-the-floor arrangements are a little staid and repetitive by comparison. The synthesis of this incoming stamp with Souleyman’s traditional style is not entirely seamless – the joins are audible, and somewhat jarring too. Opening track ‘Ya Boul Habari’ is the most conspicuous, its clean-cut beat draping a glossy sheen over the track, dampening the illusion of spontaneity that is so central to the magic of Souleyman’s music.

That said, almost no production quirks could suppress Omar Souleyman and his playing. With the singular exception of the mournful, aching track ‘Mawal’, To Syria, With Love is a celebration of the music of Omar’s home. With the life and vibrancy of the compositions necessarily tapered by the sobering, harrowing reality of the honesty in his lyrics, he has brought us an all-too-real-life case of tears on the dancefloor.

Pitchfork 65

When Sublime Frequencies’ 2007 compilation Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria) introduced Syrian singer Omar Souleyman to the West, one could write about the jalabiya and keffiyeh-clad artist with perhaps only a side mention of his home country. Besides its secondary status during the Bush era as an extension of the “axis of evil,” Syria was otherwise not part of the nightly news cycle. But as Souleyman made inroads in pop culture—his coarse voice finding itself alongside the likes of Björk and Gorillaz in the studio and on festival stages with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and MGMT—Syria and President Bashar al-Assad occupied more of the news feed. Since the start of its civil war in 2011, news of chemical warfare, the millions of refugees fleeing the country, its festering humanitarian crisis—not to mention its status as part of a new president’s travel ban—Syria may yet plunge into all-out international conflict.

How did Souleyman and his gruff plaints of love and heartbreak become the sound of Syrian music in the west? Souleyman works in the musical form of dabke—primarily line-dancing fare for weddings throughout the rural parts of the Levant. As DJ/rupture noted in his 2016 book Uproot, “ignorance of dabke is a prerequisite for his success… plucking an artist from a scene and repackaging him or her for wider consumption is as old as the music biz itself.” A decade after being introduced to Souleyman’s music, I’ve yet to hear another dabke artist, which may be by design. Even if he’s the exception that proves the rule, in foregrounding the electronic stomping beat that powers modern dabke, Souleyman has gained access to a Western dance music culture that few from his and other regions could possibly imagine. Since a split with Sublime Frequencies earlier this decade, Souleyman has found himself in a wide range of company: Four Tet, Gilles Peterson, Legowelt, Modeselektor, and Trilogy Tapes-associated producer Rezzett. On To Syria, With Love, Souleyman now counts the likes of Major Lazer, Baauer, and RiFF RAFF as labelmates. It’s a peculiar fit.

To Syria also marks the first time that Souleyman hasn’t had his right hand man Rizan Sa’id handling the bank of synthesizers and drum programming. Instead he works with Hasan Alo, who, like Souleyman, is also from the Hasaka region and displaced by the war. Like most of Souleyman’s work, few of the song topics touch upon current events, instead depicting the never-ending war that is romance. Lyrics come from longtime collaborator Shawah Al Ahmad and even amid the sleek club squiggles and beat bombast of “Ya Boul Habari,” Souleyman sings of the heart’s pain. “You are the incarnation of love and beauty,” goes one line. Though when Souleyman sings “You’ve been holding my soul captive for a year/Send me your news, at least once a month,” it seems eerily close to a different kind of hostage situation, especially considering Al Ahmad’s own recent brush with Daesh. (He was imprisoned by the group near his home in Aleppo and had his flock of sheep taken away from him.)

Dizzying polyrhythms make “Ya Bnayya” one of the album’s most hypnotic tracks. The needling synthesized mijwiz tones that Alo provides alternate across it: sometimes sounding tightly-wound to the beat, other times wobbling with wild abandon. But too often, the sonic palette that Alo puts behind Souleyman lacks the subtle blend of coarse and silken that Sa’id could toggle with the nimblest of moves. The heavy kick that thuds through each track here feels anonymous and monotonous, making the album a slog to push through. Amid the high warbling of “Khayen,” Alo somehow manages to shoehorn in even more tech-y squelches. The dramatic piano flourishes of “Aenta Lhabbeytak” offer up a change of pace. But the canned beats and whooshes that comprise the song’s backdrop make it seem like it could come from any shiny shirt nightclub from Athens to Beirut to wherever Assad goes to get away from it all.

The last two tracks are where Souleyman truly changes up his approach, both songs serving as pleas for peace. Closer “Chobi” retains its firecracker percussion and canned synth tones, but Souleyman thinks not of love when he growls “we are in exile, and our nights are long.” As the penultimate track suggests, the slower, more agonized songs best reveal Souleyman’s strengths. Often in his back catalog, Souleyman’s voice has evoked the cries of a desperate man at the precipice of unbearable heartache, no doubt the work of a great singer embodying his role in detailing the pain of love. But on “Mawal,” it cuts closest to home for the displaced Syrian: “Oh, I’m tired of looking for home/And asking about my loved ones/My soul is wounded.” An entertainer in exile, Souleyman’s voice embodies the thousands from his land who are now refugees, who simply want to return home whether it’s been leveled or not, the grain of his voice as wearied and fraught as anything you will hear all year.

The Guardian 40

(Mad Decent)

Like much of Mad Decent’s output, any two minutes of To Syria, With Love sampled at random sound fantastic – an aural peephole into the most exciting party on the planet. However, a mountain range would never be beautiful if it consisted entirely of peaks, and the same is true of Syrian folk-techno albums. The unrelenting tail-thump beat flattens an initial dynamism into a tiring, trebly melange, and Omar Souleyman’s emotional voice begins to hector rather than implore. The impassioned ballad Mawal stands out as a contemplative reprieve, but it isn’t anywhere near enough to rescue the album.