Land Of Kush- Sand Enigma

Label: Constellation

Released 2019

Renowned Montréal/Cairo composer Sam Shalabi returns with his exhilarating and utterly genre-bending big band Land of Kush. The trenchantly-titled Sand Enigma bristles with defiant exuberance, restless creative energy, and electrifying cross-cultural expression - the band's most accomplished, acute and accessible album to date (though don't expect 'easy listening' from this boundary-pushing hydra-headed entity). Sand Enigma is a wildly diverse and hugely compelling tour de force of modern composition that pulses with emotion and experimentation, blending avant-garde, psychedelic, Middle Eastern, out-jazz, electronic, and improv/free music tropes to stunning effect. The 75-minute opus, brilliantly recorded by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Matana Roberts) captures a band on fire, flowing through composed set-pieces, improvisational turns, harmolodic gestural and textural interplay, bursts of fervent groove, and fearless, feral experimentation. While the bounty of heavy-hitting instrumental players are too numerous to call out here, Sand Enigma notably features two new Land of Kush collaborators, both of them leading lights of Cairo's burgeoning avant-electronic scene: Nadah El Shazly and Maurice Louca. As Alan Bishop of Sublime Frequencies raves: "Shalabi raises the bar for modern psychedelic music with Land of Kush, weaving a seamless montage of styles in a transcendent way that is rarely, if ever, achieved."

Track Listing:

1. Aha
   
2. Domyat 1331
   
3. Safe Space
   
4. Broken Maqams
   
5. Sand Enigma
   
6. SSSSSS
   
7. Recuerdo
   
8. Bone Mass I
   
9. Bone Mass II
   
10. Bone Mass III
    
11. Ana
    
12. Trema
    
13. Dol
    
14. Tensor