The Rough Guide to Arabic Lounge

Lounge – it's a tricky old concept. ‘Mood music that evoked exotic elsewheres’ is how the liner notes define its original incarnation. Yet genuine exotic elsewheres are ever more difficult to find or even imagine: Morocco is now but a budget– airline flight away for Europeans, and North African musicians speak a global digital language as fluently as anyone else. Contemporary lounge is often more familiar than exotic and Djamel Laroussi, Smadar Levi and Rim Banna are cases in point, even if the latter's ‘The Hymn of The Sea’ boils with all the tension of a life lived in Nazareth. It takes an old hand like Bill Laswell to make electro-ethnic fusion sound truly otherworldly, lifting ‘Droub Al Lil’ by the blind Moroccan oud (lute) player Azzddine Ouhnine into the realm of cosmic dub. Where the original concept of lounge really does get a shot in the arm, however, is with the Iraqi oud maestro Munir Bashir's adaptation of the theme to the Freudian 1950s Western Johnny Guitar, a mesmeric example of the Middle East re-imagining the Wild West. Natacha Atlas harks back to the same era on ‘Hayati Inta Reprise’, sumptuously approximating the exotic elsewhere of post-war Egypt rather than Hollywood. Other, equally exotic pieces – a classical cello improvisation from Emad Ashour and the hymnal vigil of Dozan's ‘Ya Mo’ – are served less well by the ‘lounge’ tag, though no single genre can really do it justice. Androgynous-voiced Algerian Akim El Sikameya bittersweet– talks his way through the bonus disc, most intriguingly on ‘Amertume’, on which his baroque fiddle seems to melt over brushed-percussion jazz.