Souleyman is one of the luminaries of Dabke, a style of Syrian folk dance music that has made its way to North American ethnographic fetishists and the crate-digging/blog-sniffing wing-tipped-Oxford-snobs via awesometapes.com and world music label Sublime Frequencies. Dabke is music for gatherings, and Souleyman’s ultra-minimalist, synth-driven take on it is no exception—this is music for a party. It’s exhaustingly energetic, a relentless acrobatic onslaught of synth-emulated reed lines, traditional melodies, Euro-dance sounding drum machine and Souleyman’s lacerated bark laid overtop.
This article appears in Dec 26, 2013 – Jan 1, 2014.
