The engine of Omar Souleyman’s biggest hits, keyboard player Rizan Sa’id, steps centerstage for his first solo LP, King of Keyboard – an album that was waiting to happen, and now has thanks to Discrepant. From fiery dabke to beatless synthesiser poems, this is a zinger!
Kurds, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Armenians, Yezidis, and Arabs had lived together for centuries in this largely agricultural region. The area is closer to Iraq in proximity and culture than the rest of Syria – evident in the dialects, clothing, food and music. In the mid-1990s, in the small northeastern town of Ras Al Ain, Rizan Said – maverick pioneer of the Syrian Kurdish electronic synthesizer was getting his start. Rizan was a musical prodigy from a young age – a gifted player of percussion and reed instruments before a wealth of synthesizers began flooding Syria in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Steadfast on the Syrian cassette album circuit at the time, Rizan the boy wonder was already sending his signals out from the Jazeera frontier, thanks to a partnership with local producer Zuhir Maksi.
These sounds were indeed designed for dance, but when you’re at a Syrian wedding party, you begin to understand that this has been going on for centuries, before electro, disco, hipsters, and orientalists. This is the updated sound of the ages, where hand drums and reed flutes are now emulated and pounded out on Korg keyboards.
