The music producer escaped Assad’s Syria and ended up in a Swedish refugee centre, where the space and minimalism of ambient allowed him to express his alienation
The 30-year-old Syrian producer Obay Alsharani’s debut album, Sandbox, is stunning. Its textural layers and floating fragments of melody easily match Burial or Boards of Canada’s abilities to deliver devastating emotion with a dreamy lightness of touch. But where many talk about ambient music and virtual worlds as providing sanctuary and succour, for Alsharani, the reality of that is deadly serious. Sandbox was conceived and written while trapped in limbo in a refugee centre, north of the Arctic circle and around 2,000 miles from home, struggling to come to terms with the terrors that had brought him there.
Talking via video chat from Stockholm, Alsharani is as disarmingly gentle as his music, maintaining a friendly, matter-of-fact tone whether discussing his tastes, or the realities of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. “From when I was eight,” he says, “my father worked in Saudi Arabia, he had a good job, and I got used to moving around, which is useful to me now.” The family lived in four different Saudi cities, returning to Damascus for the summer each year.
Continue reading...by Joe Muggs via Electronic music | The Guardian
No comments:
Post a Comment