Al-Qasar interview: “We live in a world of very complex identities, with multinational families and lots of migration”

Thomas Attar Bellier speaks with an evident pleasure about what he calls “the crazy cultural mashup” our music world lives in today. One of his main influences, the Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, who was famous for ‘Orientalising’ the electric guitar and playing with Abdel Halim Hafez and Oum Kalthoum, was indebted to the music of surf-rock guitar hero Dick Dale. In turn, however, Dale was heavily influenced by his father’s Lebanese family, especially an uncle who played oud. “So you got this sound coming from the Middle East and becoming a key influence on the Southern California surf culture in the 1950s and 60s, and then this guy from Egypt being influenced by it and bringing it back across the ocean,” says an obviously delighted Bellier. 

This would amount to no more than an anecdote if it wasn’t so entrenched in the very idea of ‘cultural mashup’ that is in the origin of Bellier’s Al-Qasar, a band he put together in 2017 when he got fed up with being in a psychedelic rock act and completely lost his interest in this “old formula of a bunch of white dudes playing loud guitars.” Having been born in France and later settling in Los Angeles, he felt he should be making music “that was more representative of the societies” he lived in, creating “something more colourful, diverse, culturally mixed and exciting.” In Al-Qasar’s case, that meant music still rooted in psychedelic rock, but that also incorporated elements of North African trance and Middle Eastern melodies and grooves.

After demoing the first ideas with the help of Jordanian-American poet Fareed Al-Madain, he quickly booked their first shows, including dates in Egypt. Performing in Cairo, “the musical centre of the Middle East,” was an “insane” experience that not only gelled the whole project but also enabled the band to travel and meet a lot of people. “In the long run it really impacted on what we were doing,” says Bellier, “because we were making lots of friends, people who had been active during the 2011 revolution, and we got to listen to their stories. It was intense to discover what the Arab Spring meant for those people and the very real consequences it had on their lives – friends who went to jail or got killed.”

From that point onwards, the political aspects of the Arab world also became a big part of Al-Qasar’s music. And they are very much at the forefront of the band’s debut album, Who Are We?, out now on Glitterbeat. The band worked closely with Jaouad El Garouge, a Paris-based Moroccan Gnawa musician who joined the band “interested in the idea of uniting electric guitars and traditional elements.” 

Who Are We? takes its title from a text by Egyptian poet Ahmed Fouad Negm that Dead Kennedys’ legend Jello Biafra recites in the track ‘Ya Malak’. Bellier deemed Biafra the perfect choice to deliver Negm’s powerful text about who, in reality, sustains who among the rich and impoverished, a dichotomy “that applies both in American and Middle Eastern politics.”

The album also summons Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, Sudanese singer Alsarah, oud player Mehdi Haddab and Egyptian vocalist Hend Elrawy, all broadening the Al-Qasar sound palette. Such eclectic collaborative choices lay at the heart of the band’s idea that “we live in a world of very complex identities, with multinational families and a lot of migrations,” while celebrating that complexity as something inspiring.

Read the review of Al Qasar’s Who Are We?

This interview originally appeared in the November 2022 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today