Sir Richard Bishop
The Freak Of Araby

A Norman Records recommendation (21st May 2009)

This record left our Brett feeling ecstatic.

The Freak of Araby is the new guitar action from Sun City Girls virtuoso Sir Richard Bishop. Any album that makes me want to do foreign dancing is alright by me and all I can think about at the moment is getting up and doing some sort of mental tango-y flamencoizing all over the office, maybe wearing some tassles on my nips and wielding a sexual eye glint. I know it's supposed to be all Middle Eastern and that but it really reminds me of tributes to traditional Hispanic guitar like Marc Ribot's Prosthetic Cubans stuff.. I guess classical styles are going to have plenty of things in common across the globe. We're all getting a heavy Morricone feel from quite a few of the tunes, plus maybe even a bit of The Shadows ('Apache' style) on occasion - excellent stuff and far more accessible than his usual!

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Sound clips for The Freak Of Araby

Barbary Play

Blood-Stained Sands Play

Enta Omri Play

Essaouira Play

Ka'an Azzaman Play

Kaddak El Mayass Play

Sidi Mansour Play

Solenzara Play

Taqasim For Omar Play

The Pillars Of Baalbek Play

What their label says...

The debut of Sir Richard Bishop and his Freak of Araby Ensemble,
a talented quartet of players getting deep into the Middle Eastern mystic.

· Sir Richard Bishop presents an album featuring hand
drums, percussion, bass, drums, electric guitars and a heavy
dose of Moroccan chanters, all of it captured with depth,
detail and sympathy for the eternal enigma by engineer Scott
Colburn.
· After recording a cover of ‘Ka’an Azzaman’, written by Elias
Rahbani, one of Lebanon’s finest songwriters, something
dawned on Sir Richard. Half-Lebanese by birth, he found
himself suddenly possessed to really dig into Middle Eastern
sounds. A pair of original melodies not fully developed at a
prior recording session had the Arabic inspiration, so these
were reattacked and finished in short order. Soon, Sir
Richard’s head was flooded with some of the classic sounds
spun for him by his grandfather back in his younger days, like
Farid Al-Atrache, Oum Kalthoum and Fairuz, along with
other personal favourites, such as the guitarists Omar
Khorshid and Mike Hegazi. In addition to the studio
improvisation ‘Taqasim for Omar’, the whole of ‘The Freak
Of Araby’ is dedicated to these inspiring players.
· In addition to his soul-stirring electric guitar playing, Sir
Richard grabbed a couple of Moroccan chanters and blew the
house down on ‘Blood-Stained Sands’, providing an epic
finish to this journey to the centre of one-half of the family
tree.

Taqasim For Omar * Enta Omri * Barbary * Solenzara *
The Pillars Of Baalbek * Kaddak El Mayass * Essaouira *
Ka’an Azzaman * Sidi Mansour * Blood-Stained Sands

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