Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa release Jarak Qaribak

Jarak Qaribak, Jonny Greenwood's album with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, came out on 9 June on World Circuit. It runs to nine songs in just under 40 minutes, nearly all of them Arabic love songs, and its title means roughly “your neighbour is your friend”. The record keeps one rule: every guest singer takes a song from a country not their own.

So the Egyptian Ahmed Doma opens with an Algerian song from the 1940s, Safae Essafi, from Dubai, sings an Israeli one, and the Iraqi Karrar Alsaadi travelled to Tel Aviv to sing “Ya Mughir al-Ghazala”, from Yemen. “Taq ou-Dub”, a Lebanese song telling off an ex whose title means something like “take a hike”, was recorded live with the Palestinian singer Nour Freteikh. Tassa takes one himself, the Moroccan “Lhla Yzid Ikthar”.

Most of the singers recorded their parts at home. Greenwood and Tassa produced the record themselves between Oxford and Tel Aviv, with brass, strings, keyboards, Ariel Qassis on qanun and Mustafa Amal on rebab, and a rock drum kit and drum machines in place of computers. Nigel Godrich mixed it. Greenwood has described the sound he was after as Kraftwerk in 1970s Cairo.

The Guardian made it their global album of the month two weeks before release, with four stars. Ammar Kalia's review picks out drumming on the Jordanian folk song “Ya 'Anid Ya Yaba” that recalls Radiohead's percussion around The King of Limbs. Three days after release Brian Howe gave it 7.7 in Pitchfork, naming “Taq ou-Dub”, the first song they recorded, as the record's spark and its high point.

Tassa has played the songs of his grandfather Daoud Al-Kuwaity and great-uncle Saleh with his band the Kuwaitis since 2011, the band that opened for Radiohead in America in 2017. The album closes on Saleh's “Jan al-Galb Salik”, sung by two Tunisian singers. The brothers were born in Kuwait, of Iraqi and Iranian descent, and were stars of Iraqi music before they moved to Israel in the early 1950s, and they kept their own children away from music. Under Saddam Hussein, Iraq relabelled their songs as anonymous folk songs.

Tracklist