When Sublime Frequencies’ 2007 compilation Highway to Hassake (Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria) introduced Syrian singer Omar Souleyman to the West, one could write about the jalabiya and keffiyeh-clad artist with perhaps only a side mention of his home country. Besides its secondary status during the Bush era as an extension of the “axis of evil,” Syria was otherwise not part of the nightly news cycle. But as Souleyman made inroads in pop culture—his coarse voice finding itself alongside the likes of Björk and Gorillaz in the studio and on festival stages with Yeah Yeah Yeahs and MGMT—Syria and President Bashar al-Assad occupied more of the news feed. Since the start of its civil war in 2011, news of chemical warfare, the millions of refugees fleeing the country, its festering humanitarian crisis—not to mention its status as part of a new president’s travel ban—Syria may yet plunge into all-out international conflict.
How did Souleyman and his gruff plaints of love and heartbreak become the sound of Syrian music in the west? Souleyman works in the musical form of dabke—primarily line-dancing fare for weddings throughout the rural parts of the Levant. As DJ/rupture noted in his 2016 book Uproot, “ignorance of dabke is a prerequisite for his success… plucking an artist from a scene and repackaging him or her for wider consumption is as old as the music biz itself.” A decade after being introduced to Souleyman’s music, I’ve yet to hear another dabke artist, which may be by design. Even if he’s the exception that proves the rule, in foregrounding the electronic stomping beat that powers modern dabke, Souleyman has gained access to a Western dance music culture that few from his and other regions could possibly imagine. Since a split with Sublime Frequencies earlier this decade, Souleyman has found himself in a wide range of company: Four Tet, Gilles Peterson, Legowelt, Modeselektor, and Trilogy Tapes-associated producer Rezzett. On To Syria, With Love, Souleyman now counts the likes of Major Lazer, Baauer, and RiFF RAFF as labelmates. It’s a peculiar fit.
To Syria also marks the first time that Souleyman hasn’t had his right hand man Rizan Sa’id handling the bank of synthesizers and drum programming. Instead he works with Hasan Alo, who, like Souleyman, is also from the Hasaka region and displaced by the war. Like most of Souleyman’s work, few of the song topics touch upon current events, instead depicting the never-ending war that is romance. Lyrics come from longtime collaborator Shawah Al Ahmad and even amid the sleek club squiggles and beat bombast of “Ya Boul Habari,” Souleyman sings of the heart’s pain. “You are the incarnation of love and beauty,” goes one line. Though when Souleyman sings “You’ve been holding my soul captive for a year/Send me your news, at least once a month,” it seems eerily close to a different kind of hostage situation, especially considering Al Ahmad’s own recent brush with Daesh. (He was imprisoned by the group near his home in Aleppo and had his flock of sheep taken away from him.)
Dizzying polyrhythms make “Ya Bnayya” one of the album’s most hypnotic tracks. The needling synthesized mijwiz tones that Alo provides alternate across it: sometimes sounding tightly-wound to the beat, other times wobbling with wild abandon. But too often, the sonic palette that Alo puts behind Souleyman lacks the subtle blend of coarse and silken that Sa’id could toggle with the nimblest of moves. The heavy kick that thuds through each track here feels anonymous and monotonous, making the album a slog to push through. Amid the high warbling of “Khayen,” Alo somehow manages to shoehorn in even more tech-y squelches. The dramatic piano flourishes of “Aenta Lhabbeytak” offer up a change of pace. But the canned beats and whooshes that comprise the song’s backdrop make it seem like it could come from any shiny shirt nightclub from Athens to Beirut.
The last two tracks are where Souleyman truly changes up his approach, both songs serving as pleas for peace. Closer “Chobi” retains its firecracker percussion and canned synth tones, but Souleyman thinks not of love when he growls “we are in exile, and our nights are long.” As the penultimate track suggests, the slower, more agonized songs best reveal Souleyman’s strengths. Often in his back catalog, Souleyman’s voice has evoked the cries of a desperate man at the precipice of unbearable heartache, no doubt the work of a great singer embodying his role in detailing the pain of love. But on “Mawal,” it cuts closest to home for the displaced Syrian: “Oh, I’m tired of looking for home/And asking about my loved ones/My soul is wounded.” An entertainer in exile, Souleyman’s voice embodies the thousands from his land who are now refugees, who simply want to return home whether it’s been leveled or not, the grain of his voice as wearied and fraught as anything you will hear all year.
