Monogamy

VINYL FORMAT. This deluxe 2xLP is on 180 gram vinyl, and the first pressing includes a limited edition 12"x19" poster and a CD copy of the album. Limited to 700 copies (333 available in North America)!



Sam Shalabi's Land Of Kush project returns: his psych-arabic jazz orchestra has produced a second album of intensely genre-defying, polymorphic, big band madness. Where Shalabi structured 2009's mesmerizing Against the Day album around the Thomas Pynchon novel of the same name, this time Shalabi tackles concepts of shame, sexuality and society in a new multi-movement work entitled Monogamy. Rounding up many of the same Montreal-based improv and experimental players featured on Against the Day, Shalabi deploys a cast of two dozen musicians and sound artists to realize this fantastic new compositional hybrid of Middle Eastern tropes and Western vocabularies of psych, jazz and experimental/free music.

For the Monogamy album, the group has been given its own sub-moniker as The Egyptian Light Orchestra. The band is a truly hydra-headed beast on this recording; string, brass and woodwinds careen around the drone/backbeat of the major movements, shifting between short melodic punctuations, free excursions, and consolidated unison lines. Dissonant piano, synth and electronics bubble below, above and at the outer limits of the mix. Several transitions also allow for various players to stretch out in some lovely virtuosic solo passages. Shalabi's oud anchors the album's opening and closing pieces, as well as the glorious "Tunnel Visions" piece at the album's midpoint. The rhythm section - comprising standard trap kits, upright basses and traditional Eastern percussion - holds down one hypnotic groove after another. Shalabi has once again structured his orchestral work to feature primarily female vocalists who further challenge the categorization of the music, conjuring everything from Galas or Ono-style ululation ("The 1st And The Last") to cabaret/jazz ("Scars") to ethereal psych-folk ("Tunnel Visions"). Shalabi also employs a recurring digitally-processed voice track of "dirty" glossal phrases and cut-ups that interacts rhythmically and conceptually with the work. This sonic through-line frames and re-frames the music as psycho-sexual commentary and narrative, imbuing Monogamy's many stylistic moments and movements with a higher conceptual power: frustration/liberation, chastity/carnality, innocence/shame, purity/impurity. Of course there's a "healthy" dose of id at play here as well - particularly on "Fisherman", where the emotionless, robotic voice takes over in a steady stream of irreverent, desecrating, potty-mouthed absurdism.