Photo by Raisa Hagiu
Founded in 2006 by Raed Yassin and Paed Conca, Praed is a band whose musical oeuvre can be described as a mixture of Arabic popular music, free jazz, and electronics. In the same year, the band made its first public appearance in Al Maslakh festival in Switzerland, immediately followed by a concert at the Irtijal festival in Beirut. Since then, the band has frequented numerous international music festivals and toured intensively world-wide, spanning the Arab world, Japan, Europe and Canada. Through these endeavors, they have created a large global network with other renowned musicians as musical collaborators. Their music is essentially multi-instrumental: Raed Yassin plays keyboards, electronics and vocals; and Paed Conca plays clarinet, electric bass and electronics.
The band’s main body of work explores the terrain of Arabic popular music (“Shaabi”) and its interconnectedness with other psychedelic and hypnotic musical genres in the world, such as free jazz, space jazz, and psychedelic rock among others. Since its inception, Praed has shown a very keen interest in Shaabi music as a medium that reflects Egyptian society’s complicated fabric. Through their research, they began to discover a strong cultural connection between these sounds and the “Mouled” music used in religious trance ceremonies. The hypnotizing psychedelic effect embedded in this genre presents similarities to other forms of popular music in the world that stimulate an atmosphere of sonic delirium.