ZENOBIA زنّوبيا
RELEASE THEIR DEBUT ALBUM
"HALAK, HALAK"
Out now !
Emerging from the vibrant Palestinian electronic music scene, ZENOBIA زنّوبيا have made a big impression over a short period of time: the band started performing a couple of years ago, and have already toured around the globe.
ZENOBIA’s music combines powerful beats, Levantine dabke rhythms and Arabic pop melodies. The band draw their inspiration from pop & folk music from all over the region (Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria). They refine their songs by taking them back and forth between their studio and the stage, where they improvise a lot, and feed off the audience reactions.
The band consists of Nasser Halahlih and Isam Elias. Nasser was a pioneer in the local scene, he was arguably the first Palestinian electronic music producer, back in the late 90s. Young, fleet-fingered keyboardist Isam’s background is in European classical music. The band’s headquarters are in Haifa, the third-largest city in Israel, which has a relatively large Arab population. Artists such as Zenobia have been connecting more and more with other nexuses of the new Palestinian electronic music movement which is developing -regardless of political borders- between Haifa & Ramallah, and extending to Beirut, Amman and the diaspora.
Zenobia are among the few bands from their home environment who perform abroad, and this has been very meaningful for their community, who is giving them a lot of support.
The album is entitled Halak Halak - a slang expression meaning “Welcome, welcome”. It’s the band’s second release, after the introductory EP Ksr Ksr Ksr.
Halak Halak is being released on Acid Arab Records, the special imprint created by Crammed Discs in partnership with Parisian collective Acid Arab.
Order here !
UGANDA’S
NIHILOXICA
RELEASE DEBUT ALBUM "KALOLI"
Kaloli is the debut full-length LP from Kampala’s darkest electro-percussion group Nihiloxica. The album marries the propulsive Ugandan percussion of the Nilotika Cultural Ensemble with technoid analog synth lines and hybrid kit playing from the UK’s pq and Spooky-J. The result is something otherworldly. Kaloli journeys through the uncharted space between two cultures of dance music, where the expression of traditional elements mutates into something more sinister and nihilistic.
The album takes its name from the Luganda word for the marabou stork. Kaloli are carrion birds that can be seen amassing in areas of festering waste around the country, particularly in Kampala, with its heightened levels of urban pollution.
Since 2017 the band have honed their sound in residence at Nyege Nyege’s Boutiq Studio in Kampala, one of the most vital cultural melting pots on the continent. Their debut self-titled EP for the acclaimed Ugandan label was an immediate success. An auspicious project between two UK musicians and a Kampala-based percussion troupe, Nilotika Cultural Ensemble, sparked a musical dialogue across continents with the aim to fuse two distanced cultures of dance music into one aural entity. The synergy between the group was instantaneous. The EP was composed, rehearsed and recorded with a minimal studio setup in the space of a month, giving Nihiloxica a rawness and brutality that pushed it into best-of-year lists across the world.
Recorded with Ross Halden at Hohm Studios, directly after a concert supporting Aphex Twin at Red Bull Music London 2019, Kaloli captures the vitality of Nihiloxica’s show-stopping live performances and magnifies it with pq’s honest, powerful production.
At the heart of every song is a groove, a drum pattern to be explored and developed. Each takes us through a different rhythmic territory: Busoga from the east of Uganda, Bwola from the north, Gunjula from the central region, Buganda.
The soundscape is dominated by the ancestral Bugandan drum set, consisting of Alimansi Wanzu Aineomugisha and Jamiru Mwanje on the engalabi (long drums - a tall Ugandan sister to the djembe), Henry Kasoma on the namunjoloba (a set of four small, high pitched drums) and Henry Isabirye on the empuunyi (a set of three low pitched bass drums). Wanzu also plays the ensaasi (shakers). One of the major additions to the sonic palette of Kaloli are the electronic drum sounds used more increasingly by Jacob Maskell-Key (Spooky J), providing an additional link between worlds, evident as electro-percussive punctuation on Salongo and Gunjula. The patterns beaten out by the ensemble are then explored harmonically and spectrally by the synths of Peter Jones (pq), stretching and searching for hooks and sounds among the rhythmic mayhem like kaloli picking and poking through decaying matter.
