A GLOWING review in The Wire UK May 2021 (Issue 447) by Byron Coley.
Attya X Attya - "Alpharabius" is a solo project developed by Hisham Attya, a musician of Palestinian descent, though born in Kuwait with Canadian citizenship. His work achieved wider recognition when he joined the Ottawa based psych crew The Band Whose Name Is A Symbol in 2010.
Attya played electric oud with them for a couple of years until his day
job – designing Formula 1 race tracks – required a relocation to Germany, where he began working on the Âlpharabius project in 2016. Attya’s dad played the oud and regularly hauled his son around to oud makers’ workshops, where he developed his own taste for the instrument by the age of 16. When he joined TBWNIS he built himself an electric oud so he could be heard amid their psych onslaught, becoming enamoured of various electronic doo-dads in the process. Âlpharabius is an autobiographical suite, inspired by the semiotics essays in Roland Barthes’s Image-Music-Text. I’m not smart enough to unravel the album’s structural details, but I can attest that it’s full of superbly involving music. The record is accompanied by a 20 page book of lyrics, drawings, scores and photographs, which serve as a roadmap to the proceedings. The music is quite amazing.
job – designing Formula 1 race tracks – required a relocation to Germany, where he began working on the Âlpharabius project in 2016. Attya’s dad played the oud and regularly hauled his son around to oud makers’ workshops, where he developed his own taste for the instrument by the age of 16. When he joined TBWNIS he built himself an electric oud so he could be heard amid their psych onslaught, becoming enamoured of various electronic doo-dads in the process. Âlpharabius is an autobiographical suite, inspired by the semiotics essays in Roland Barthes’s Image-Music-Text. I’m not smart enough to unravel the album’s structural details, but I can attest that it’s full of superbly involving music. The record is accompanied by a 20 page book of lyrics, drawings, scores and photographs, which serve as a roadmap to the proceedings. The music is quite amazing.
Players include personnel from TBWNIS among others, allowing Hisham access to a great range of styles, from “Ahwak II”, which sounds like a collaboration between Shady Grove-era Quicksilver and 50 Foot Hose, to “Ya Yaffa”, which mixes semi-traditional oud and vocal motifs with dubby, drifty melodica-laced smoke. One of the recurring musical threads combines folk forms with synthesized washes of sound. These tracks recall (at least in terms of construction) parts of Ikona, the 1990 debut album by Macedonia’s Lola V Stain, whose work had a similar syncretic bite. But there are few other models I can make to describe the aesthetic trajectory of this fascinating album. Âlpharabius is a very personal and idiosyncratic triumph."
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