Jonny Greenwood and Dudu Tassa announce Jarak Qaribak

Jonny Greenwood and the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa have announced Jarak Qaribak, an album of songs from across the Middle East, out on World Circuit on 9 June. The first song, “Ashufak Shay”, is out today, sung by the Lebanese singer Rashid Al Najjar.

For the sound, Greenwood says he was trying to imagine what Kraftwerk would have done if they'd been in Cairo in the 1970s⁴. It sounds 1970s, but there are drum machines, there are guitars but they're singing in Arabic…what's going on?² Tassa asks. The two produced the record themselves, and Nigel Godrich mixed it.

The title translates roughly as “your neighbour is your friend”, and no singer on it sings a song from home. Singers from Egypt, Palestine, Morocco and Iraq, and one from Dubai, take songs from Algeria, Jordan, Morocco and elsewhere, and Tassa sings one himself. Each singer recorded wherever they happened to be, and one of the practical problems was finding a studio in Beirut that worked.

By BrooklynVegan's account, Greenwood first heard Tassa's music when he was in Israel with Radiohead in the early 2000s, and he says it drew him because its roots were in the Middle Eastern music he was already hearing a lot at home. He played guitar on “Eize Yom”, from Tassa's 2009 album Basof Mitraglim Le'Hakol, and Tassa's band the Kuwaitis opened for Radiohead in America in 2017.

Israel, Tassa says, is a small country beside all those whose music feeds the record, and many Israelis, his own family included, came from elsewhere in the Middle East. The album's press notes say the pair did not set out to make a political point, though anything done in that part of the world becomes political.

Greenwood compares the work to his records with the Israeli musician Shye Ben Tzur. The scales do not fit western major and minor keys and use quarter-tones, and forcing a chord sequence on such a melody usually makes it collapse. It's like reducing the resolution on a colour photo until it's just squares.⁷ NME has the interview.

Tracklist