It seems wrong to refer to a musician with a 20-year long career and a catalog of recordings that allegedly runs into the mid-triple-digits as having a “debut” anything. But Omar Souleyman’s Wenu Wenu is in fact technically his first proper recording, having been cut in a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn rather than on site at one of the thousands of weddings he’s performed over the past two decades around his home in northern Syria, where his reputation as a performer par excellence once drove an entire economy of bootleg cassette recordings.
Souleyman’s milieu is dabke, a style of folk dance music found at social gatherings across large swaths of the Middle East, built around intricately filigreed instrumental leads, exhortative singing, and pounding, trance-inducing rhythms. It’s an old style, but in recent years it’s had a creative renaissance as dabke artists, realizing that the form shares structural similarities with Western electronic dance music, began incorporating synthesizers and four-on-the-floor drum machines into their compositions.
While many of them have used the possibilities that electronic instruments offer to build epically rococo arrangements, Souleyman’s take on dabke is almost brutalist in its simplicity. Live, and on the five LPs of material he’s released through the American ethnographic music label Sublime Frequencies, the music is performed by Souleyman and his accompanists Ali Shaker (electric saz) and Rizan Sa'id. Sa'id plays dense bursts of melody on a synthesizer emulating traditional reed sounds over a relentless beat, and with Souleyman’s inimitable quavering bark laid over them, the entire mix is overdriven to a point you more commonly encounter with punk bands.
This combination of vivid minimalism and in-the-red performance is as essential to his popularity with Western avant garde audiences as his striking uniform of white thawb, red keffiyeh, and aviator shades, which adds a retro ABSCAM visual flair and produces an interesting aesthetic frisson when combined with the music’s techno-futuristic glare. Kieran Hebden, who produced Wenu Wenu, made the wise decision not to try and improve on a sound that doesn’t need fixing.
Wenu Wenu succeeds at capturing the hypnotic energy of Souleyman’s incredible live performances, but backs off the overdriven sonics to give the music newfound room to breathe. In the process we can finally appreciate some of the nuances in Sa’id’s playing, like the funky inflections in his basslines and the finger rolls sequenced into his drum patterns. Hearing the keyboards more clearly also gives the sound more stylistic flexibility. Synthy horn stabs in the earwormy titular opening track evoke 80s and 90s club pop, while the ersatz strings and fretless bass in the midtempo “Khattaba” add a not unwelcome layer of glossy schmaltz to the mix.
While some of those choices in synth patches were undoubtedly Hebden’s, they’re never obvious. There are touches here and there—the subtle modulated delay on a synthesizer lead, the odd filter sweep—where his participation comes through, but it never sounds like he’s trying to make Wenu Wenu a Four Tet album, or make Souleyman fit the parameters of Western dance music or, god forbid, sound fashionable.
Still, the music here can compete against any kind of dance music being made right now, and succeed. Dabke lives or dies by its ability to make people move, and although Souleyman is no-frills, and borderline gruff compared to other dabke performers, there’s something in his stentorian singing that’s irresistible. It’s still best experienced live, but after 20 years of mostly bootleg-quality tapes, there’s finally a recording worthy of calling the next best thing.
