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LP
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SR 519LP
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Maurice Louca is one of the most gifted musicians and composers on Egypt's thriving underground music scene. This forthcoming full-length album draws voraciously on Arabic music, psychedelic folk. The title Saet El-Hazz is a coded saying in Egypt to refer to a good time and usually implies a great deal of debauchery. "When you mention to someone that you've had a saet hazz, there are no questions asked. It is what it is." The initial spark for Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour) was Louca's desire to collaborate with "A" Trio, the Lebanese improvisational group featuring Mazen Kerbaj on prepared trumpet, Sharif Sehnaoui on prepared guitar, and Raed Yassin on prepared double bass. "When the three of them come together they create a sonic cosmos entirely their own. I started by composing music that I wanted to have exist within this sonic world- at times in harmony, or clashing with it, and all the emotional ranges in between." Just as "A" Trio served as the spark, a commission from Mophradat, an arts organization based out of Brussels, was the tinder. The commission was for a new composition to be performed using instruments that Louca would modify to play microtonally. This led him to Turkey and Indonesia. In Istanbul, he worked with a luthier to custom-make a guitar. In Surakarta, he ended up with an instrument maker tuning a Serang-referred to as the Indonesian xylophone, part of the family of Gamelan tuned percussion instruments. These new modified instruments opened up the composition to new tonal possibilities which drove Louca to expand his line up to include Khaled Yassine, a longtime collaborator and versatile percussionist and drummer, Christine Kazaryan, a dynamic harpist whom he met via Praed Orchestra, and Anthea Caddy, a cellist who came highly recommended from the Berlin free improv scene. Saet El-Hazz (The Luck Hour) is a long form composition of six movements, recorded over the course of a week in August 2019 at A/B studios in Brussels. RIYL: Sun City Girls, Tortoise, Nadah El Shazly, Amirtha Kidambi, Don Cherry, Jaubi, Pharoah Sanders, Sunil Ganguly. Black vinyl. Includes insert.
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LP
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SR 474LP
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2024 repress. Orange vinyl. On Elephantine, Maurice Louca's new album released exclusively on Sub Rosa on vinyl LP, the Cairo-based musician guides a 12-piece ensemble through a 38-minute masterwork that might best be described as panoramic. Elements of free improvisation, Sun Ra's cosmic jazz, gorgeous Arabic melody, trancelike African and Yemeni music, and minimalism meet in his wholly unique compositional vision. Louca has in recent years garnered a global reputation through two previous solo albums and an expanding, evolving lineup of genre-defying collaborations. The Wire called his 2014 sophomore solo effort, Benhayyi Al-Baghbaghan (Salute the Parrot) (NAWA 002CD/LP/X-LP, 2014), "remarkable music-dense, driven and splashed with colour." In 2017, Lekhfa (MST 003CD/MST 4001LP), the debut by the trio of Louca and vocalists Maryam Saleh and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, was praised as an "edgy triumph" by the Guardian. For Louca, 36, Elephantine serves as both the pinnacle of his wide-ranging experience and a bold next step in his development as a composer, arranger, and bandleader. "There was a blessed thing about the process of making this record," Louca says of the sessions, held in Stockholm. "The dynamic between us musically but also as people . . . What these musicians delivered was really more than I could ask for, Everyone played their hearts out on this record." The music-from its pensive lulls through its stretches of hard-grooving hypnosis and moments of avant-jazz catharsis-testifies to that rapport. Best absorbed as a continuous performance, Elephantine's six individually named tracks nonetheless present striking self-contained landscapes. "The Leper" entrances through a deft use of repetition that Louca gleaned from cosmic jazz, African and Yemeni music, and other transcendental modal traditions. "Laika" manages to evoke the minimalists, though on the combustible terms of '60s and '70s free jazz; "One More for the Gutter", on which Louca ingeniously pits one half of his ensemble against the other, albeit in a synergistic way, mines similarly fiery terrain. "The Palm of a Ghost" distills the band to a Cairo-rooted core, featuring stirring spontaneous melodies from oud player Natik Awayez, violinist Ayman Asfour, and vocalist Nadah El Shazly. The album's title track follows, and it too blurs the border between composition and improvisation with gorgeously atmospheric results. "Al Khawaga", with its colossal ensemble riffs, beautifully dirty swing, and impassioned blowing, is an ideal finale. RIYL: Sun City Girls, '70s Miles Davis, Don Cherry, Alice Coltrane, Tortoise. Cover art by Egyptian visual artist Maha Maamoun.
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LP
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NAWA 002LP
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140 gram black vinyl LP version with download code. Salute the Parrot signals a departure for Maurice Louca from his first solo album Garraya -- in which he composed electronic music unaccompanied -- into the realms of acoustic orchestrations, both composed and improvised. Featuring guest performances by Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Alvarius B.), Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Shalabi Effect), Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (Alif), Khaled Yassine (Anouar Brahem/Alif) and vocals by Egyptian Mahraganat MCs Amr 7a7a and Alaa 50, to name a few. Those who may have heard live iterations of Salute the Parrot at Louca's jaw-dropping shows across the Arab world and Europe over the last couple of years, will encounter a much more complex and hard-hitting work of many influences. From psychedelic to Egyptian Shaabi, Louca shatters the confines of musical and cultural labeling with a work that is truly unique. The album's new live and acoustic elements, coupled with limited pre-recorded material, present ample space for improvisation and fluidity within its composition. Its eight tracks offer a unique record of this new vision, and prepare the ground for future live performances of Salute the Parrot, which will never sound totally the same. For the design of the album artwork, Louca collaborated with Egyptian visual artist Maha Maamoun, whose videos and photographs address the form and function of images that are found in mainstream culture, to act as a lens through which familiar images are seen in novel and insightful ways. Salute the Parrot's artwork aptly conveys the abstract and microcosmic character of Louca's sound in three subtle variations, one for each of the album's formats.
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CD
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NAWA 002CD
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Salute the Parrot signals a departure for Maurice Louca from his first solo album Garraya -- in which he composed electronic music unaccompanied -- into the realms of acoustic orchestrations, both composed and improvised. Featuring guest performances by Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls, Alvarius B.), Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Shalabi Effect), Tamer Abu Ghazaleh (Alif), Khaled Yassine (Anouar Brahem/Alif) and vocals by Egyptian Mahraganat MCs Amr 7a7a and Alaa 50, to name a few. Those who may have heard live iterations of Salute the Parrot at Louca's jaw-dropping shows across the Arab world and Europe over the last couple of years, will encounter a much more complex and hard-hitting work of many influences. From psychedelic to Egyptian Shaabi, Louca shatters the confines of musical and cultural labeling with a work that is truly unique. The album's new live and acoustic elements, coupled with limited pre-recorded material, present ample space for improvisation and fluidity within its composition. Its eight tracks offer a unique record of this new vision, and prepare the ground for future live performances of Salute the Parrot, which will never sound totally the same. For the design of the album artwork, Louca collaborated with Egyptian visual artist Maha Maamoun, whose videos and photographs address the form and function of images that are found in mainstream culture, to act as a lens through which familiar images are seen in novel and insightful ways. Salute the Parrot's artwork aptly conveys the abstract and microcosmic character of Louca's sound in three subtle variations, one for each of the album's formats.
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LP
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NAWA 002X-LP
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140 gram green vinyl LP version.
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