Mephisto Halabi The Arabic Room

Label / Unrock
Category / Psychedelic Rock, Folk, Middle Eastern
Code / UNROCKLP023

Mephisto Halabi is a current moniker for drummer Julius Masri, a musician whose talents lay far, far, far beyond just keeping time on a drum kit. His album The Arabic Room doesn’t fit into any neat musical categories. I’d say that it doesn’t even belong in any of the not-so-neat categories, blending elements of eastern exoticism, circuit-bent electronics, and some of the heaviest free improvisations you might ever hear. Masri plays all of the instruments, from electronics and keyboards to Egyptian rababa, Azeri kamancheh, and the hammer dulcimer. The results are straight from the lab of a mad scientist, with sounds and ideas boiling over their beakers and test tubes, wrecking everything in their path. When I say that the music of Mephisto Halabi is almost uncategorizable, I’m not trying to find myself an easy out — I mean it. The Arabic Room is named for a room in Masri’s house when he grew up in Lebanon. This particular sitting area, meant for guests, is a fixture in Lebanese culture, but Masri’s family gave their Arabic room their unique bent by mixing western and eastern cultures. When Masri’s family moved to America, they set up the same sort of room in their new house. This idea of an Arabic room, where cultures were free to collide in the eyes of the family’s guests, must have affected Masri as he was assembling this album. Even within the album’s first 20 seconds, sources start to ping violently off one another.

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Mephisto Halabi The Arabic Room

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