It almost seems unreal, the way that Lebanese underground pioneer, Zeid Hamdan, and Syrian singer, Lynn Adib, met – like a scene from a movie, or the kind of anecdote reserved for a musician’s cosy couch chat with Jimmy Fallon.
You see, Hamdan and Adib, though seemingly from different ends of the musical spectrum, met at the home of Syrian band, Tanjaret Daghet, with whom Hamdan had been working with for several years. Adib, who has studied at the American School of Modern Music and the Conservatory Regional Influence De Paris, hit it off with Hamdan and they’ve been inseparable since Adib moved to Beirut in 2019, the duo explained in a recent interview with Arab News – and it’s this unlikely but potent combination of the two that has given birth to new collaborative project, Bedouin Burger. The duo’s first single comes in the form of ‘Taht El Wared’ (Beneath the Roses), a song motivated by Adib’s pondering of death, triggered by a visit to her deceased husband’s final resting place. It provides the heart and emotion of a song that sees Hamdan augment his popular indie-pop sounds with a range of influences, including classical Arabic poetry and Egyptian pop and using analog synths and old drum machines, as well as acoustic recordings.
In ‘That El Wared’, Adib – who claims an intangible affinity to Bedouin culture – delivers her vocals in similar fashion to the chant-based taghrooda style of singing, the repetitious and sometimes blunt vocal patterns adding a hypnotic quality to the song.
After the initial, basic tabla, the deep rumble of bass is worked in and the beat heightens to a techno-styled one that still retains a raw, Arab sound and heightens even further to become atypical in pattern.
It’s a unique sound that straddles the acoustic and the electronic, the eastern and the western, paving the way for more exploration by an equally unique coming together of minds.
