43 f Lebanotronica
Yasmine Hamdan’s relocation from Beirut to Paris helped her produce an original 21st century blend. Jamie Renton hears about the journey.
ences, it shouldn’t really work except per- haps as the Orientalist soundtrack to the dinner party from hell. And yet Ya Nass (Crammed Discs) is an album to return to again and again, especially late at night, its light Euro-electropop trappings hiding some deep Middle Eastern roots.
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Here she comes now, weaving her way through the crowded lobby of a Euston hotel. She’s clad in denim but somehow looking just as glamorous as on the cover of the album where she smoulders out over her bare tattooed shoulder – but turns out to be intelli- gent and charming with it too. A new name to me before this album, although her voice is naggingly familiar – it turns out she was half of Lebanese duo Soap Kills, who were a bit like Beirut’s answer to Trans- global Underground.
“When we started working on this album, I had the desire to go for something more intimate,” says Yasmine. “We” in this case was Ms Hamdan and French producer Marc Colin, formerly of Franco electro- poppers Nouvelle Vague. Their orig- inal intention was the simple pre- sentation of four folk songs, “But I like to dig into very complex melodies and without simplifying them in a bad way, take them into minimalist places.” This goes some way to explaining the elusive appeal of the album. Where most record- ings of this type bombard your ears with either pounding beats, great
asmine Hamdan’s latest album is a strange but lovely creature. With its misty combination of pure vocals, electronics, acous- tics, Lebanese and French influ-
washes of ambient wifty-waftiness or (worst case scenario) both, Ya Nass is all about the spaces, the bits left out.
Anyway, back to those four folk songs. “I worked on them with a guitar player, trying to find a vision of what I wanted.” Had she stopped there, we’d have had an EP of folk songs, but at this point, enter Monsieur Colin and a serious period of reworking. “It went in a very intuitive and gradual way and we started hav- ing fun in the studio. But I think there’s also a spirit ual journey that I went through on this album. It was inspiring and creative and I was enjoying this space. I was trying to complement one song with another and create different vibrations. Part of my work is to research and I have this real love of old Arabic music. So I started digging into some of that.”
Marc proved the per- fect collaborator. “He does- n’t understand a word of Arabic and he doesn’t under- stand any of the songs. I don’t think he even read the translations. So he was just working in pure sound, pure emotion. We didn’t really have a reference point, it just felt thrilling working with this raw material and being free to do whatever we wanted.”
An earlier version of the album was released in France. Then Yasmine signed to Crammed. “I’ve always been searching for this environ- ment,” she says of the Belgian label, “where people are
Photo: Nadim Asfar
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