In a very “fourth world” manner, Alek Lee brings together middle-eastern influences in his music with ease and without ever having it sounding cliché: on Harabait and Sfarot (and its dub version), his friends and him play the violin, the bass clarinet and the accordion in a way which reminds of Klezmer music, putting the three songs on the EP in line with both his musical education and his cultural background.
Fortuna Co-Founder Kalbata takes the controls for this new, Middle Eastern techno banger. Al-Shark is a banging Arab Farfisa excursion played frantically on an analog techno rhythm section. It’s the first release from the Fortuna camp which is not a reissue, but worry not, this could easily be an ancient Lebanese proto-House experiment unearthed from a dusty reel. For the B-side Kalbata takes things even further with a tribal relick of the original, placing us in a voodoo ceremony where ghosts of sinners come to dance.
Ahmed Malek was one of the most important musicians of the Algerian scene of the 1970s. His sountrack works that were composed for various Algerian movies of the time fuse Arabic influences with jazz, psych and funk influences. Dark cineastic soundscapes meet african Jazz at times reminicent of Mulatu. Original copies of his vinyl releases have been sold for enormous amounts. For this release we combined the strongest tracks from his releases with a selection of unreleased material straight from the families archive. The vinyl edition comes with a 8 page 12” size booklet, the cd version with a 16 page booklet with lot of unseen photos, an interview with the artist from 1978 and an introduction to Algerian cinema.
The Hipodrome Of Music 