Omar Souleyman has 500 records, a personal poet, an acid-house sound and a slot at the Electric Picnic
MEET THE COOLEST wedding singer in the business. More than 200 acts are appearing at Electric Picnic this weekend, but only one of them has 500-plus releases to his name, brings a poet on tour to whisper inspirational verses in his ear between songs and is still a sizable draw on the wedding circuit at home. We speak of Omar Souleyman, the man in the sunglasses bringing the most bonkers sounds imaginable from Syria to Stradbally.
Western audiences first caught sight of Souleyman through his appearances at festivals such as Sónar, in Barcelona, last year and All Tomorrow's Parties in the UK this year. The buzz about Souleyman usually revolves around a sound that is tough, fast, frantic and hugely thrilling. That this hypnotic, mesmerising take on dabkefolk music – with Souleyman chanting and singing over waves of shuddering, squalling, pulsating keyboards – sounds to western ears like an acid-house wig-out has helped spread the word about him.
Souleyman’s main collaborators, the poet and lyricist Mahmoud Harbi and the multi- instrumentalist Rizan Sa’id, have played a huge part in developing this addictive sound and style.
The chain-smoking Harbi is the one who whispers lyrics in the singer's ear onstage; the hugely innovative Sa'id ensures Souleyman sounds like nobody else on the dabkecircuit. Indeed, it's Sa'id's fondness for electronic wizardry that has given Souleyman's material its trance-like sheen.
A Souleyman show is part rave and part traditional knees-up, but it's how the joins between these two unlikely bedfellows disappear on tracks such as his big hit Leh Janithat make Souleyman so appealing to his different audiences. After all, his trips to play for western festival-goers, who might see him as just this year's most exotic world-music offering, are not his only source of income.
Via an interpreter, he explains that bookings for wedding banquets in Syria continue to fly in. “We still do about 20 wedding parties a month. How we work at these is the same way we work over in Europe or the United States. It’s the same music. During a wedding the people make a circle, holding hands. I stand in the middle, but I don’t dance. My words and the music make people dance.”
Souleyman’s prolific recording output is also down to the wedding circuit, which takes him up and down Syria’s highways and byways. Only a small proportion of the hundreds of releases available in his homeland were recorded in studios; the rest of the tapes were recorded live at weddings. “We record them as a presentation for the bride and her family,” Souleyman says. “We give the tapes to the bride and the people who attend the party. The people we mention in a song buy the tape.”
For a bite-sized look at this sprawling back catalogue check out the Highway to Hassakecompilation, on the US label Sublime Frequencies, which makes a good fist of putting some order on Souleyman's releases to date.
Born and raised in rural northeastern Syria, close to Turkey and Iraq, Souleyman says he started singing when he was a young fellow. “It was local and it was traditional,” he says of these early days, though the traditional music he is talking about was already a mix of Middle Eastern styles.
It was when he hit the wedding and function circuit, in the early 1990s, that Souleyman’s fame began to spread beyond his Hassekeh base. “In 1994 the band started when I met Rizan Said and started doing the parties with him. I had never sung before as much as that. My parents didn’t want me to sing, and I did not come from a musical family.”
It took six or seven years of hard slog for Souleyman and his band to break through. “In the beginning we didn’t write our own songs; we would sing traditional songs. We did family functions, Christian parties, Kurdish parties. Soon people knew my name, and so people would ask for Omar Souleyman to play their parties. Now I am also known for my video clips, so I am popular in the shops and on TV.”
Along the way Souleyman added more collaborators to his crew. “I worked with five poets during that time, but it was Mahmood who gave me the best ideas. When we improvise we always find something very good together.”
It was the arrival of Mark Gergis, of Sublime Frequencies, who first brought Souleyman to the attention of western audiences. Gergis was hooked by Souleyman’s sounds on a visit to the country in 1997, but it wasn’t until 2006 that he tracked down the musician and got permission to put out the compilation that put Souleyman on the map outside his homeland.
All of which begs a question: is a rake of Omar Souleymans waiting to be discovered in rural Syria? “We are original, but people copy us,” he says. “They hear our music and try to work out what we do. Everyone tries to copy what we do and take what we do. But we don’t copy anyone. We use all these influences because no one else has done it before. We have always wanted to be something new.”
Where to catch him
VideoCheck out Souleyman doing Leh Jani at tinyurl.com/ywzsev.
TunesHighway to Hassake, the Sublime Frequencies compilation.
SeeOmar Souleyman plays the Body & Soul stage at Electric Picnic tomorrow.
