Very few record reviews contain much personal information, and that makes sense: what you care about is the music, and I'd just assume the occasional hatemail remain as vague as possible. But for you to appreciate the following, I need to tell you that I'm a slightly geeky Jewish male with an ambiguous relationship to Zionism and an aversion to second-hand smoke. Maybe my left-of-center bias in the current xenophobic climate should make for another rubber-stamp approval of Andre Afram Asmar's first desert-dub release on esoteric hip-hop label Mush. But let me put it this way: I am certain that at this very moment, this album is playing in dorm rooms where oppressed-person status, long attention span and sturdy lungs are a prerequisite for entry. That's not an ad hominem; every time I put this album on at home, I feel like I'm hanging out in a place where my kind is not wanted.
The Palest-afarian photo collage in the liner notes reminds me of the walls of those oppressive college suites I naively thought I should enjoy chilling in. And though the streams of stoner-speak that open the first track, and the accompanying co-op basement drum circle, had me squirming right off the bat, the quality of the mix did keep my attention. But "Camel Clutch", in which singer Elias is completely drowned out by a mess of reverbed percussion, is a sign of failures to come. Sure enough, for the rest of the album any stray musicality gets drowned out by a rhythmic mess so moist-- nay, sodden-- that I can hardly hear myself hate it. Is this what Andre means when he calls himself "the mugician"?
More to the point, what is it about Asmar's mix of unarticulated victim politics, para-Rastafarianism, and spiritual exhaustion that I find so hauntingly annoying? It's one of the more familiar brands of college narcissism on the West Coast, and I should be used to it by now. Maybe more disturbing is that Asmar uses his Middle Eastern provenance not as a source of musical ideas-- Arabic vocal samples are mixed just like anything else into the loose dub textures-- but as a license to fairly drip with self-indulgence, as carte blanche for songs that don't go anywhere, built from stale beats, inane mantras, and extended gurglings. To make matters worse, someone in the control room is dead set on putting everything through the same cheap delay pedal, like the wild world of water sports without the wild, or the sports. Just wet.
Capable experiments in mixing crop up once we leave the desert for a more tropical feel: straight-ahead "Scientism", for example, starts with a clean, guitar-driven hook, then makes its way from reggae-in-the-club to dub-in-the-headphones with an uncharacteristic smoothness. In "Duniagariba", traditional North African drumming melts into a braying hurricane, then congeals back into traditional drumming, deftly. Taken as a whole, though, these aimless jams herald no innovative fusion, no new Arab dub. Even Edward Said would nod off in no time. This is no innovative fusion, no new Arab dub, just the same old aimless weed-soaked jams. Mugician, indeed!
