Rabih Abou-Khalil Cactus of Knowledge

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If someone asked me to try to describe this album by genre, I guess I would try to fumble words around until something like "Emotional Arabian Jazz with a hint of Impending Doom". If that doesn't make a lot of sense to you, then don't worry; we're on the same page.

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I stumbled across Rabih some years ago at around 4:30 in the morning in my friends' apartment. I was staying in a spare "room" they had in exchange for cleaning and food leftover from the restaurant I worked in. I would come home as late as 3 AM from the restaurant, and my friend's partied quite a bit, so often I would come home to a household of dwindling debauchery, as half the group had passed out while the other half were telling me about how "everything's gonna be just fine, man", or "everything is so fucking fucked".

Anyways, I came home on one such night and found one of my friend's in the latter state of mind. He was pretty fucked up, and I come home to him dancing all over the porch to some fairly wild music whilst trying to wake our other friend up, who I'm assuming fell asleep right before he got there.

So was this my introduction to Rabih? No. I don't have any idea what artist he was playing. He did, however, fall asleep in my "room" with his phone plugged into the speakers. I let YouTube do it's work and the next thing I knew I had arrived on another album of his "Blue Camel".

One of the things I like about this series is it causes me to really have to think about some of the music I've discovered throughout the years. I try to switch up genres, time periods, countries of origin, etc. with each post, which causes me to delve a little deeper into my past. I had actually taken a note to post "Blue Camel", and before I could do so, it led me to this album, which is incredible.

Rabih Abou-Khalil was born in 1957 in Lebanon. He moved to Germany during the civil war, and now lives part-time in Munich, and part-time in France. I was somewhat surprised to learn that considering the very strong Middle Eastern sounds that emanate from his recordings. However, that really is only a small part of his influence, considering the wide amount of "world fusion" that goes into his music.

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I've heard him called a jazz musician, a psychedelic rock musician, an experimental classical composer; pretty much every label fits him. I find artists with the capacity for such diversity to be the most fascinating; contrary to the main bulk of the music I listen to, punk, which is stereotyped(often correctly) to be very simple in musical structure, the complexity lying more-so within the messages in the lyrics.

This is a great album from an incredibly talented artist. Give it a listen below, and stay tuned for more entirely random shit:

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