Land of Kush - Sand Enigma

Land of Kush - Sand EnigmaRenowned Montral Cairo composer Sam Shalabi returns with his exhilarating and utterly genre bending big band Land of Kush. The trenchantly titled Sand Enigma bristles with defiant exuberance, restless creative energy, and electrifying cross cultural expression the band's most accomplished, acute and accessible album to date (though don't expect 'easy listening' from this boundary pushing hydra headed entity). Sand Enigma is a wildly diverse and hugely

Renowned Montréal/Cairo composer Sam Shalabi returns with his exhilarating and utterly genre-bending big band Land of Kush. The trenchantly-titled Sand Enigma bristles with defiant exuberance, restless creative energy, and electrifying cross-cultural expression - the band's most accomplished, acute and accessible album to date (though don't expect 'easy listening' from this boundary-pushing hydra-headed entity). Sand Enigma is a wildly diverse and hugely compelling tour de force of modern composition that pulses with emotion and experimentation, blending avant-garde, psychedelic, Middle Eastern, out-jazz, electronic, and improv/free music tropes to stunning effect. The 75-minute opus, brilliantly recorded by Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart, Matana Roberts) captures a band on fire, flowing through composed set-pieces, improvisational turns, harmolodic gestural and textural interplay, bursts of fervent groove, and fearless, feral experimentation. While the bounty of heavy-hitting instrumental players are too numerous to call out here, Sand Enigma notably features two new Land of Kush collaborators, both of them leading lights of Cairo's burgeoning avant-electronic scene: Nadah El Shazly and Maurice Louca. As Alan Bishop of Sublime Frequencies raves: "Shalabi raises the bar for modern psychedelic music with Land of Kush, weaving a seamless montage of styles in a transcendent way that is rarely, if ever, achieved."