Description

A collaboration between the folk rock musician Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls) and “A” Trio developed during Bishop’s many trips back and forth from the Lebanese capital.
The album’s five tracks include three largely improvised numbers, a loose reworking of early Sun City Girls’ track “The Imam”, and a cover of a traditional Americana song “Gently Johnny”.
The album displays remarkable coherence for musicians coming from starkly different backgrounds. True to their habits, Kerbaj, Sehnaoui and Yassin create acoustic improvised drones that range from insistent, chiming resonances with emergency alarm bells, to low thrumming hums – evoking helicopter gunships hovering overhead, or bulldozers demolishing bomb-blasted apartments. The three musicians largely avoid conventional technique, instead using what sounds like motorized devices to generate rattling, metallic vibrations, building a mechanistic backdrop out of which the instruments’ true voices occasionally arise. Perched above the ambient din, Bishop is in fine form, and alternates between gentle crooning and malevolent whispering. 

“A remarkably coherent album, Burj Al Imam can transport the listener through these these troubled, north African lands like a windowless Mercedes running at full speed. After four largely improvised pieces, the album couldn’t have had a more perfect ending with a cover of traditional Americana song “Gently Johnny”, which appeared on the Wicker Man soundtrack, a movie about an island inhabited by a morally bankrupt cult that was so brainwashed, they believed murdering people in cold blood was good and rational as it would bring back their crops and appease false gods. It’s hard not to see the parallels with today’s politics. For me, this is already a classic.”
Bogdan Scoromide, The Attic

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