Omar Souleyman, James Locksmith, Alps @ The Annandale Hotel, Saturday March 12

It’s hardly necessary to know who Omar Souleyman is to dance yourself into a state of euphoric exhaustion, but it probably helps. Coming off the back of a turbo-charged appearance at WOMADELAIDE the night before, the number one pop star of his native Syria (self-proclaimed – not that you’d want to argue) was snubbed by Sydney audiences tonight, the Annandale’s normally grindingly claustrophobic main bar being criminally under capacity. Whether this was due to Souleyman’s late booking (possible), lack of publicity (probable) or simple lack of interest amongst punters remains open to debate.

The sparse attendance aside, proceedings weren’t helped much tonight by some rickety support. DJ James Locksmith spent much of his first hour spinning various Middle Eastern flavoured dance and ambient tracks to a few early birds.  Not exactly a drawcard, but it did provide the soundtrack to a gratifying hour’s lounge. Less so was Alps, whose guitar work may well have been fine ‘n dandy were it not for the fact that the instrument was painfully out of tune – a shame, considering the vigour of his loop-based keyboard tracks.

Whether because of technical difficulties or the vain hope that the venue might fill up at the last minute, it wasn’t until forty minutes after his scheduled start time that Souleyman finally took the stage, Locksmith’s interim efforts at the laptop unable to prevent the natives from getting pretty restless. Fortunately they all had ample opportunity to burn away the twitches within the first five minutes of Omar Souleyman’s frenetic and at times glitteringly discordant music.

Planting himself in the middle of stage, Omar calmly watched the mayhem developing below him as regal as any monarch surveying his realm, with his static presence resplendently attired in a checkered keffiyeh (a Yasser Arafat-style head scarf), dark round eye-glasses, with a slight paunch nudging against his djellaba (ankle to neck length robe). Souleyman was joined on stage only by composer and synth player Rizan Sa’id, an impassive-faced dynamo, whose approach to the traditional dabke involves injecting it with steroids and setting it loose with a machinegun beat, as the sounds of the village are transmogrified into dancefloor crack. It’s impossible to simply stand and listen to Omar; the urge to throw oneself around like a lunatic is far too great. Those lucky enough to attend this curiously bungled evening did so with glee.


First published in The Brag, Iss. 404, 21st March 2011