Open Strings

We Say...

Review by Michaelangelo Matos

The best thing about the London record label Honest Jon's — known as much for its co-owner, Blur/Gorillaz mastermind Damon Albarn, as its consistently excellent releases — is that you never know what it's going to offer next. Especially now that it's been digging through the worldwide vaults of EMI Records, an excavation that's brought forth a stunning grab-bag called Sprigs of Time (covering 1903 to 1957), a pair of delightful collections focusing on West African artists (Marvellous Boy, a calypso comp, and Living Is Hard, covering the music of W.A. immigrants in England during the late 1920s), and now this something-old/something-new assemblage.

The first half of Open Strings' features 20 tracks of Arabic classical music, mostly recorded in the 1920s: keening, meditative, frequently beautiful exercises that alternate between delicate (Haigo's "Shushtar" ends so quietly it forces you to edge closer to the speakers, second by second) and tough (on "Hidjaz Taxim" and "Yeghia Taxim," Nechat Bey picks the strings with a steeliness that echoes in your head long after it's finished). The second half features ten new recordings by contemporary performers who generally work in similarly rustic, droning styles paying tribute to the '20s artists here with their own variations. The best of these have a keen sense of play to them: the scene-setting, slightly echoed acoustic guitar of "Olive Oasis" by Sir Richard Bishop (of the Sun City Girls), the glossy fingerpicking of Six Organs of Admittance's "Goat, Thorns and Brick" (great title — apt one, too), and Rick Tomlinson, who opts for electric on "Surfin' UAE," which connects Haigo and Bey's old traditions with a different sort of classicism — namely, Dick Dale-style surfboard twang.