45 f
wrote at home, working on a four-track, you could hear the sounds of my aunts and the street… I took these recordings to Ziad and he said ‘OK, you don’t find me any musicians? I think I’ve found the solution. It’s something called a Groove Box, it can do everything!’ And we started programming on the Groove Box and sampling.”
As she was listening to a lot of classic vintage Arabic sounds at F
the time, Yasmine threw in samples of these. “In the end we were doing trip-hop, electronic Arabic music because we didn’t have any other solution.” As time went by, live musicians were added to the mix (once they could afford them) but by then Soap Kills’ elec- tronic foundations had already been firmly laid.
rustrated by the lack of a local music scene, Yasmine quit Beirut for Paris in 2002. “I needed to be in a neu- tral space, be nourished by other influences and have a larger world, allowing me to continue my musical adventure and be inspired. I’m rooted, but I need my space and total freedom.” Soap Kills continued for a couple more years, but the logistics of a long-distance musical relationship inevitably took a toll. Also, she was after something more elec- tronic. She made some demos and worked on retaining her musi- cal identity in increasingly electronic surroundings.
“I tried to connect the songs to the Arab world in different ways. I started researching some pop-kitsch Egyptian, Iraqi stuff. Not only music, something very social, with political, humorous, erotic layers in the songs and lots of hints. It was more like an atti- tude, dealing with some things that are taboo by using humour and metaphor, which is very Arabic. For example, one of the songs that I sing in concert is about a lady called Aziza. It’s based on a popular joke, which talks with irony about the way in which men approach women who they want to have sex with, but without saying it. So it’s all about what you reveal and what you don’t reveal. With Arabic, there are always layers, it’s always under the table. It’s part of the poetry, part of the mentality and creates mys- tery and a tension, as people start to guess and you laugh and it becomes an intimate relationship, like a joke everybody gets, without it being blunt.”
Yasmine Hamdan plays the Bush Hall, 310 Uxbridge Road, London W12 7LJ on 17 October.
yasminehamdan.com F
Photo: Adrian Meskotif
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