Review

Delving into why Sam Shalabi’s Land of Kush

Soundcheck
“I come to tell you that I am Osama, risen from the dead like a phoenix,” says a matter of fact voice on Montréal-based psychedelic/improv musician Sam Shalabi’s extraordinary new release, Osama. The title summons up the ghost of the hidden or deceased AlQaida leader in an act of apparent provocation, but it turns out to be Shalabi’s first name too. Born in Libya, of Egyptian parents who emigrated to Canada’s remote Prince Edward Island when he was five, Shalabi has found himself treated post-9/11 as a suspected terrorist merely because of his name and nationality. Osama arrives as a potent musical response to rampant Arabophobia in North America, but also as a very personal, ambivalent and honest description of turbulent times.
Like that other remarkable response to 9/11 and its aftermath, David Rees’s comic strip Get Your War On (www.getyourwaron.org), Osama achieves its effect not through dogma or slogan, but by describing what it actually feels like to be living in the West right now. Get Your War On’s characters are depicted using a tiny repertoire of images of businessmen and women taken from corporate clip art, used over and over so that they appear literally trapped at their desks and their computers, while they discuss their fears and responses to the latest moves in the War on Terror; by contrast, the cast of Osama’s voices emerge from a montage of musical styles, from balls to the wall guitar heroics through queasy avant classical strings to repetitive driving electronic music and Shalabi’s own self-taught oud explorations. Interwoven throughout are a variety of human voices, including the sound of someone crying, a series of monologues and dialogues and songs, and what sounds like whole populations fleeing in panic. At times the guitars sound like instruments of torture, the embodiment of American military-technological supremacy; elsewhere, they express the wordless rage and sorrow of impotent populations shoved around by vast global forces.
Shalabi started work on Osama about a year and a half ago. “I wanted to do something literal and autobiographical, specific to what was going on at that time,” he explains. “But the whole process of doing something ‘political’, even about what was going on in my life with my background, began to bring up a lot of questions about why was I doing it, what effect did I think it would have, and who was I doing it for. So then I stopped because I started to think that the idea of doing protest music about something so huge was self-deceptive and opportunistic. And when I started it again, all those feelings were included in the process of making it, in producing a sketch of what I felt was going on, something that was a bunch of voices, a survey of different feelings, impressions and perceptions of the situation. The whole thing started to get darker, more absurd - there was an element of futility to it. It seemed impossible to do something that was fairly literal, that would say anything that would have any value.”
Osama has received some hilariously savage reviews in the alternative press (sample: Stylus magazine judged, “Osama is not avant; it’s fucking garbage”). In truth, it’s a genuinely disturbing record, precisely because it refuses to be situated in any one category, whether crudely anti- or pro-war, experimental or pop. Shalabi speaks of his admiration for mid-1960s Frank Zappa productions like We’re Only In It For The Money, but the disc also recalls the tape splicing delights of The Faust Tapes, and the sheer rage of Caetano Veloso’s 1972 ‘comeback’ record Araça Azul, which also gleefully mixed concrete sounds and ethnic recordings with Metal guitars and delicate psychedelic pop in an iconoclastic denunciation of conformity during the years of Brazilian dictatorship. A veteran of the Montréal scene, Shalabi currently plays in 11 ensembles, including the ethno-psychedelic Improv unit The Shalabi Effect, whose excellent Alien8 CD, The Trial Of Saint Orange, mixes FX-laden oud and tabla with guitar and electronics; and Molasses, a big drone ensemble whose floating line-up has included members of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Come’s Thalia Zedek and others. For Osama, Shalabi brought together a cast of some 30 musicians from Montréal’s ever fertile avant rock underground, including Godspeed’s Efrim Menuck and Sophie Trudeau, and Jessica Moss from A Silver Mount Zion.
Like Zappa, and other great pop tricksters, Shalabi plays with our desire for truth and confession on Osama. On Mid East Tour Diary (2002), a musician reads from his tour diary, describing his travels through Casablanca, Cairo and Nablus, where he plays a gig after a suicide bomber has struck, before ending in Jerusalem, where he has a nervous breakdown and wanders the street in a paranoid daze. Finally he decides to cancel the rest of the tour. The pathos of the story is strong, yet Shalabi reveals that the narrative, like others on the disc, is “a total fabrication. The intention behind that was to do something like a typicai musician, fairly articulate, naive yet politically aware, going on a tour to the Middle East, and what his impressions and solutions were to the situation he was in. It’s ridiculous because his solution is to withdraw into himself, and that constitutes solving the Mid East crisis! He just implodes on himself.”
On both Osama and 2002’s On Hashish Shalabi pays homage to the work of German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose recently translated Arcades Project is a thousand page montage of quotes and theories about 19th century Paris that reveals the fabric of a culture through a vast matrix of perspectives. “One great thing about Walter Benjamin is that he looked at his time and said that all the levels of the culture are intertwined - there’s no outside,” Shalabi enthuses. “Even if you think you’re outside of some of the preconceptions and prejudices of your time, if you’re positioning yourself against them, that doesn’t mean anything. You’re still in that culture and time, and part of the problem with the underground scene is that a lot of people don’t realise they’re part of the infrastructure of commodification and capitalism. There’s a place in the status quo for dissent, and it’s easily recuperated. It’s another option or choice which people can go towards to feel good about themselves. The thing to look at is the actual medium and ask: Does it actually do anything? Are you actually doing anything? And if that’s a question that’s too silly to ask - well, that’s where my sense of futility comes from. Is that all we have? To be able to say these things and comment from a position that’s fairly comfortable, where there’s really not much at stake?”
Voyage au bout de Shalabi
Osama est un objet solo non identifiable qui explore l’arabophobie
Il est toujours fort agréable de discuter avec Sam Shalabi. L’homme sait de quoi il parle. Lorsqu’il ne se range pas avec le quatuor Shalabi Effect, l’improvisateur-compositeur mène de front une bonne douzaine de projets: du jazz libre de Balai Mécanique à la chanson déraillée au sein de Molasses. Vers la fin de 2001, Shalabi entreprend l’écriture de pièces autobiographiques et dissidentes à propos des attentats du 11 septembre. Après six mois de travail acharné, une certaine confusion s’empare toutefois du processus créatif.
«Je voulais absolument me prononcer en tant que musicien, explique-t-il, puisque la plupart des artistes semblaient mal à l’aise de dire quoi que ce soit. Personne ne réagissait. Avec l’aide d’Éric des Donkeys, j’ai d’abord eu envie de quelque chose de très prosaïque et d’organisé. Mais, peu à peu, je me suis demandé si la protestation n’était pas finalement un leurre en soi.» L’aventure aura duré plus d’un an, mais Osama (sur Alien8 Recordings) en valait sans doute la peine. Comptant sur l’apport d’une trentaine de musiciens de la scène locale (des membres de GY!BE à un chœur soufi), les cinq morceaux vont du rock lourd à la narration la plus absurde. Toutefois, Shalabi insiste pour dire qu’il a voulu atteindre le plus grand nombre d’auditeurs. «Contrairement à On Hashish, ces pièces sont jouées live. J’ai ainsi tenté de faire un album rock dans la plus pure tradition. Une sorte de documentaire mis en musique où l’on passe d’un extrême à l’autre. Je crois avoir obtenu le reflet d’un certain état d’esprit durant cette période, plutôt qu’un message politique quelconque.»
L’excès
Moins hermétique que son premier effort, Osama déstabilise, inquiète et dérange celui qui s’attend à une trame familière. On découvre plutôt un album où l’imprévisible est à l’honneur: de la construction minutieuse au chaos le plus élégiaque. Encore une fois, Shalabi prêche par l’excès. La paranoïa, la crainte, la joie, la révolte, de même que l’humour se retrouvent dans un même souffle tentaculaire. L’idée reste, sans doute, de pervertir la culture au sens le plus large. Comme le signale Shalabi à l’autre bout du fil, «je n’ai pas eu l’intention de produire un truc cynique. J’imagine plutôt une sorte de polyphonie étrange avec l’apport des nombreux collaborateurs sur cet enregistrement, sans avoir à rendre compte d’un message universel. Bien sûr, je m’oppose à la guerre ou à la haine raciale. Cela va de soi, mais il m’est impossible de penser en fonction d’un agenda artistique».
Alors que paraît cet album sans la moindre concession, Shalabi se distingue aussi sur trois des quatre CD (chez No Type) qui documentent la très active scène d’improvisation free montréalaise. Justement intitulé Montréal Free, ce coffret réunit les groupes Po, ’Gypt Gore, Burns/Caloia/Heward, ainsi que Balai Mécanique pour une confrontation pure et dure. «Cet autre versant de ma recherche musicale me stimule et me passionne plus que jamais», confie Shalabi. Pour entendre le guitariste d’origine anglophone avec une dizaine d’improvisateurs sur scène, vous pouvez assister aux concerts-lancements, qui se tiendront les 25 (à La Sala Rossa) et 26 mars (au Va-et-Vient), pour coïncider avec la sortie officielle de l’imposant coffret. Par ailleurs, Shalabi a également d’autres projets en vue. «On termine présentement le troisième album de Shalabi Effect avec une sortie éventuelle cet automne. Ensuite, j’aimerais entreprendre une séance d’improvisation avec des chanteurs tout comme des field recordings en suspens. Il y a aussi un projet de transcription des musiques de Morton Feldman pour guitares.» Beaucoup de boulot en perspective, donc.