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intelligent, spiritual and about both the art and the relationship.” This was particularly refreshing as she’d previously been signed to a big, money-minded record company for an album released in 2009 under the name Y.A.S. on which she worked with former Madonna collaborator Marwais.
The plan was to rerelease Ya Nass with the addition of the I
track Hal, which Yasmine had specially written for the soundtrack of Jim Jarmusch’s forthcoming film Only Lovers Left Alive. “Then we thought ‘Why don’t we work on some new songs?’” she explains. In fact she already had one completed tune: Enta Fen Again, a collaboration with pianist Gael Rakotondrabe of alt-folk- sters CocoRosie. Three more new songs were subsequently added and what had started out as a straight-up reissue became a whole new thing. “It was very interesting because by redoing the songs I rediscovered them in different ways and the new songs added something else.”
try and put my finger on the elusive mood of the album and end up just saying what it isn’t: it’s not late night easy listen- ing or straight folk or electronica… “And I’m not a real Arab,” adds Yasmine. “And that’s the story of my life. There is no category! This goes back to the late 1990s when I start- ed in music with Soap Kills. We were an underground Lebanese band singing in Arabic. But I was not really considered an Arabic singer, because I didn’t sing in the way that was expected. I was deconstructing it. Arabic music is very classical, very coded. When I started I had the emotion, drive and vision, but I didn’t really have the knowledge. So we didn’t get played on Arabic radio.”
“I act when I sing,” Yasmine tells me. “I interpret my songs, taking on a different personality from one song to another.” And she takes that a stage further by appearing in the new Jim Jar- musch film. “I was invited as a guest at a concert that friends of mine organised in Marakech and he was there. After the concert he came over and explained that he was writing a movie and was inspired to write a scene featuring me. Three years later, I was sent the script and wrote the song Ha. We shot it live in Tangier and it was fantastic!”
Jarmusch is an artist with a strong identity, who mixes and matches various styles and genres. I can see a real similarity of sen- sibility with Yasmine. “Absolutely! He’s precise in his work, very sensitive and spiritual. He’s a musician too and there’s something organic and jazzy in the way he shoots his scenes.”
Beirut was once known as the ‘Paris of the Middle East’ due to its thriving nightlife and air of glamorous sophistication, but by the time Yasmine was born in the civil war era of the 1970s, all of that was long gone. “I’ve only seen pictures,” she says of the earli- er time. “Things have been destroyed by war. So I didn’t have access to a memory of the past and had to find a way to connect to it. I think I’ve managed to do this through music.”
As a result of the civil war, Yasmine’s family moved around to the Gulf States and Greece, allowing her to soak up all the varied musical influences she could lay her ears on, before returning to Lebanon in the 1990s. “When I came back, I felt a certain freedom, certain opportunities for expressing myself that I was not aware of when I was living in, say, Abu Dhabi. I realised that there were interesting people that I could meet and started to have access to more culture and connect with music.”
At this point she hooked up with Ziad Hamdan (no relation) with whom she formed Soap Kills. “He was a DJ on local radio, playing hard rock. It was funny because I’d knock on the door of this house, a veiled woman would answer and you could hear the sound of loud hard rock from the back. The house was where the radio station broadcast from. The brother of this veiled woman was a hard rock lover! I wanted to discover more about music and in the end inherited all of his hard rock cassettes. I listened to them, but was not really a fan although I liked some psychedelic rock.”
When she started out, Yasmine sang in English. “It was normal to do so in Lebanon at the time. It wasn’t the trend to sing in Ara- bic.” She enrolled on a psycho logy course but in truth felt a bit trapped. “Beirut is a small place and I had a desire to enlarge my world. Doing music was a way for me to escape reality. When I started singing in Arabic, everything started making sense.”
Soap Kills was the perfect vehicle for Yasmine’s desire for self- expression. “It was a liberating space, allowing me to take control of my life.” As with Transglobal Underound, the duo fell into elec- tronic music as a means to an end. “I started writing these psychedelic Arabic songs and there just weren’t enough musicians. I
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