Music Monday - Mashrou' Leila
Mashrou' Leila (مشروع ليلى) is a band from Lebanon that started off as an experiment and has been steadily gaining popularity and exposure over the past few years. I started to listen to their music very recently and I'm enjoying their songs and and videos. If you are in Dubai, you can watch the band performing live at The Music Room (Majestic Hotel).
They sing in Arabic and their music is a blend of Eastern and Western influences. Unlike many music acts from the region that try so hard to be 'very fusion' and just end up looking and feeling very contrived, Mashrou' Leila seem to be very at ease in what they do and I'm looking forward to seeing them live.
Read this recent interview with Mashrou' Leila on Triplew.me and enjoy the following songs and videos.
Raksit Leila / رقصة ليلى (Leila's Dance)
Fasateen / فساتين (Dresses)
Ghadan Yawman Afdal / غداً يوماً أفضل (Tomorrow is a better day)
Here's a small essay by Raafat Majzoub that really gives you a great insight into the band:
Mashrouʼ Leila is not a bandʼs name. It is not a proper noun per se; Mashrouʼ Leila is Arabic for ʻan overnight projectʼ lusting out a microphone, a violin, a bass, two guitars, drums and keyboards. It started out as a music workshop at the American University of Beirut in 2008, an open platform for students of architecture and design, somewhere to experiment with sounds and make things audible. Haig Papazian, Carl Gerges, Hamed Sinno, Omaya Malaeb, Andre Chedid, Firas Abou Fakher and Ibrahim Badr have enjoyed this sound fetish savoring its façade of nonchalance and feeding on its lack of genre – sustaining their collective as Mashrouʼ Leila, an experiment.
You can hear Leila, cascading melts of masculine vocals only suspended with thrusts of violin, beats and bass – attacked by neurotic melody that means no harm – sometimes tender, even sometimes on pause. Through the music, you can smell where Leila has been, in bed sheets, on sidewalks, jasmines in rifles and spilled coffee on dresses as she made you play with aubergines, dancing her dance.
Music has constantly been their place to play with things, to match and mis-match, a project. In the various performances, Mashrouʼ Leila is a constant attempt to taste and produce, more than happy to harvest anyone from the audience as a guest in their encores. They have performed around Lebanon since 2008, playing in various venues in Beirut, taking over supposed public piazzas as well as clubs, pubs, hybrids and the such – they also played in Zahle, Sour, Jounieh, Saida and Deir el Qamar, each of which pushed forward their thinking about how to go about their music, lyrics and performance.
It is only when Mashrouʼ Leila goes live, that you can actually catch a glimpse of Leila. As it talks to you of Beirut, the city that tastes of the absurd, the product of its day-to-day experiences, its stubborn security and lack of the latter, its musical bombshells, incoherent sexuality and thrusting pleasure…narcotic pain – as it brings forward hints of Arabic Tarab, rock, to folk pop, electro, you can see Leila in every man and woman in the silent- come-raving audience. In this trajectory, they participated in music workshops and concerts in Amman and Cairo to maneuver their way into a pan-Arab music scene, to know and to announce, more importantly to grow, musically.
In March 2009, Mashrouʼ Leila won the Lebanese Modern Music Contest jury prize and public vote organized by Radio Liban in partnership with CCF, Incognito and the Basement. They have recorded their debut album with B-root Productions, which was launched in December 2009. The music in the album is a reclamation of the aftertaste; sequel-ing a dose of Beirut.